Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids

by Meghan Daum

Contrary to a lot of cultural assumptions, people who opt out of parenthood (and, to be clear, this is a book about deciding not to have children; not being able to have them when you want them is another matter entirely) are not a monolithic group. We are neither hedonists nor ascetics. We bear no worse psychological scars from our own upbringings than most people who have kids. We do not hate children (and it still amazes me that this notion is given any credence). In fact, many of us devote quite a lot of energy to enriching the lives of other people’s children, which in turn enriches our own lives. Statistically, we are more likely to give back to our communities than people who are encumbered with small children—not just because we have the time but because “giving back” often includes returning the kids to their parents at the end of the day.

I realized that what I wanted most of all was to find some different ways of talking about the choice not to have kids. I wanted to lift the discussion out of the familiar rhetoric, which so often pits parents against nonparents and assumes that the former are self-sacrificing and mature and the latter are overgrown teenagers living large on piles of disposable income.

It’s about time we stop mistaking self-knowledge for self-absorption—and realize that nobody has a monopoly on selfishness.

This was not an age when people wallowed in parenting. Kids like my parents got married and started having children right away, before they even knew what they were giving up to do it.

Every now and then I’d squint my eyes to visualize a time when I’d start feeling the craving myself: when I was thirty, it would be at thirty-two; at thirty-two, I’d be ready by thirty-six; and on it went.

So much of being a grown-up is about managing or quelling desires. For food, for drink, for sex, for good times; if you’re a woman, I maintain, for ambition. You should not want too much. It is strange, then, to be in a position where society demands you should have an appetite for something. And yet here was a rare instance where I was appetite-free, and the world seemed to be saying, “You have to want this thing, if only so that we can help you work through your feelings about not having it!”

It’s also my little “fuck you” to a society that sentimentalizes children except when it comes to allocating enough resources to raising them, and that would include elevating the 22 percent of children currently living in poverty to a decent standard of living.

“When I think about my future, I envisage the fulfillment of ambitions such as traveling and furthering my career, not having babies. I can’t imagine I will be able to give up the lifestyle I lead to become a parent. Financial independence is very important to me, as is retaining my own independence in any relationship. Something would have to give in order for me to properly care for a child, and, unfortunately, it’s most often the mother who has to forgo some aspect of her life.”

I remember a woman, a mentor, who once asked me if I thought I’d make a good mother. When I told her honestly that I didn’t know, she was mightily displeased. It was as if I’d confessed to being a bad person. But I am astonished at those who are unfazed by the prospect of child raising. A male friend of mine, childless but confident, once assured me, “You just give them lots and lots of love.” Perhaps only a man could believe it is as simple as that.

Our own culture likes to sentimentalize motherhood with a certain kind of mushy tribute, as in those Procter & Gamble “Thank you, Mom” commercials aired during the Olympics. But if being a mom really were something held in high esteem—if it were even regarded with the same respect as other work that people do—women everywhere would probably be a lot happier and more fulfilled than we know them to be.

Mothers who are able to successfully combine work and family are all around me, yet the compatibility of career and kids remains a concept I understand intellectually but seem emotionally unable to accept. And so when I tell people—usually female friends—that, at age forty-one, I “don’t know” if I want children or still feel that I’m “not ready,” what I’m really saying is that I don’t believe I can do the things I want to do in life and also be a parent to kids, nor am I willing to find out.

But my sister and I did not need to hear our mother acknowledge how much parenting—much of it single parenting—limited her life; we saw it every day. We understood that by devoting her life to us, she was, in some ways, giving up herself.

I waited to feel what my friends did. Or an inkling thereof. I attended the baby showers and loathed the fussy luncheons, the cringeworthy games (condoms unscrolled on bananas, dimes held between knees), and especially the tedious ceremonial unwrapping and passing around of presents, the tiny onesies, hand-knit blankies, baby-food grinders. Dutifully, I showed up at the hospitals to meet the new humans. I kissed their hot snuffling faces, gathered them, all bundled in flannel and terry cloth, into my arms; holding them made me deliciously sleepy and relaxed. But it didn’t make me want one of my own.

I have been grateful for the freedom not to have children—it is a relatively new freedom, unknown to most women throughout history.

I harbor no deep biological urge, no longing, no worry over who will visit me or wipe my ass when I’m elderly. If the biological clock were an actual organ, mine would be as useless as an appendix.

I learned that there was more pain and hurt than there was joy and happiness in the world, and it scared me to death to think of bringing a brand-new person into that heady mix.

“But you’re so good with kids,” my friends say. “You know you’d be a good mom just because you’ll never make the same mistakes your mom did. Children have a way of healing you.” That sounds like a spectacularly shitty premise to me, and way too much pressure to put on a child.

As a woman who chooses to be childless, I generally have just one problem: other adults. Living in a culture where women are assumed to prioritize motherhood above all else and where a woman’s personal choices are often considered matters of public discussion means everyone thinks they have the right to discuss my body and my choices, so anyone who is curious about my lack of spawn feels the right to march right on over and ask me about it.

I admire women who look at the rigors of parenting and decide they’re just not cut out for it, or just don’t want to try, and I wish that we had more conversations about childlessness that didn’t force us to approach them from such a defensive place.

choosing not to become a parent means that I’ve had to redefine my concept of family. I consider my family to be a cobbled-together group of friends and people I’m related to, all defined by the fact that I can count on them.

Though I’ve often said I’m not afraid to get old without the built-in support system most people find in their children because I’ve created my own chosen support system, the truth is that I won’t know for sure until I get there.

But to me, the lack of desire to have a child is innate. It exists outside of my control. It is simply who I am and I can take neither credit nor blame for all that it may or may not signify. But the decision to honor that desire, to find a way to be whole on my own terms even if it means facing the judgment, scorn, and even pity of mainstream society, is a victory. It’s a victory I celebrate every day.

“I’m pretty sure that having it all might not be. I think maybe having it all is chopping yourself into too many little pieces, taking care of everybody’s needs except your own.”

Some of my closest friends love being mothers, live, to a certain extent, to be mothers. It has been the single most challenging and rewarding endeavor of their lives. Others of my friends don’t like it that much, thought they would like it better than they do, are counting the days till the last kid goes off to college so they can turn their attention to their own dreams. A few friends pretend to love it, but everyone within twelve square miles can hear them grinding their teeth. Still others pretend motherhood is the world’s biggest hassle and yet you can tell they love it deep down. And then there are my childless friends, who fit right into corresponding categories: the ones who love childlessness, the ones who regret it, and the ones who pretend to be in the opposite camp from the one they’re in. A childless friend recently said to me, “I will never regret not having children. What I regret is that I live in a world where in spite of everything, that decision is still not quite okay.”

There are quite a few actualities of contemporary American life that despite all the time I’ve had to get used to them still stagger my imagination. It staggers my imagination that so many people who are struggling physically and financially are so resistant to the policies that would provide them with affordable health care. It staggers my imagination that an angry teenager can walk into a store and buy a weapon that will fire a hundred rounds of ammunition without reloading, but I can’t take my 3.2-ounce bottle of Aveda shampoo on board an airplane embarking on a forty-minute commuter flight. And it staggers my imagination that any woman will vote for a politician who has been up front about wanting to control what does and doesn’t happen inside her womb.

It feels to me, all in all, like a comparatively honorable life. It also seems honorable that another woman would value motherhood over all my priorities. But I do not believe that I am selfish and she is not. There are women who choose motherhood for selfish reasons. There are mothers who act selfishly even if they chose motherhood in a burst of altruistic love. Selfishness and generosity are not relegated to particular life choices, and if generosity is a worthy life goal—and I believe it is—perhaps our task is to choose the path that for us creates its best opportunity.

I do understand that it is noble to want what is best for one’s children. But I worry that we have taken a big step backward if it is perceived as nobler still when doing for one’s children comes at great expense to oneself.

Nonmotherhood is forever. Making a conscious choice about something so fundamental, and so intertwined with one’s own past, with society’s expectations, and with notions of femininity and the purpose of life, takes every ounce of will you have; going against the grain always does.

The turning point came when, after seeing that I had run out of excuses and still wasn’t enthusiastic about pregnancy or motherhood, I finally said to myself, “I don’t really want to have a baby; I want to want to have a baby.” I longed to feel like everybody else, but I had to face the fact that I did not. This meant that I had to work through the implications of being radically different from most other women in a fundamental way, that my requirements for happiness and fulfillment actually precluded the things they found crucial.

The problem is that there is nobody alive who is not lacking anything—no mother, no nonmother, no man. The perfect life does not and never will exist, and to assert otherwise perpetuates a pernicious fantasy: that it’s possible to live without regrets. There is no life without regrets. Every important choice has its benefits and its deficits, whether or not people admit it or even recognize the fact: no mother has the radical, lifelong freedom that is essential for my happiness. I will never know the intimacy with, or have the impact on, a child that a mother has. Losses, including the loss of future possibilities, are inevitable in life; nobody has it all.

It is true, and should be recognized, that women can be fulfilled with or without children, that you can most definitely have enough without having everything.

Now, there’s a red herring if ever there was one. Not having children is seen as supremely selfish, as though the people having children were selflessly sacrificing themselves in a valiant attempt to ensure the survival of our endangered species and fill up this vast and underpopulated island of ours.

The other move put on you by the parenting lobby is that you should have kids because you might regret not doing so when you get older. This seems demented and irrelevant in equal measure since while life may not have a purpose, it certainly has consequences, one of which is the accumulation of a vast, coastal shelf of uncut, 100-percent-pure regret. And this will happen whether you have no kids, one kid, or a dozen. When it comes to regret, everyone’s a winner! It’s the jackpot you are guaranteed to win.

Watching my friends marry and reproduce while I remained single and childless made me feel like a foreign exchange student: I could understand some of the language of coupledom and parenthood, but I was not a native speaker, and I was always trying to catch up in conversations.

parents still remember what it was like to be us, but we can’t imagine what it’s like to be them; their experience encompasses ours. I accept that people with children are having a deeper, more complex experience of being alive than I am, and this is fine with me.

If the ultimate purpose of your life is your children, what’s the purpose of your children’s lives? To have your grandchildren? Isn’t anyone’s life ultimately meaningful in itself?

Who knows why I’m devoid of such a nearly universal human impulse?

Is it possible that I will regret not having had children when I am old and dying alone? People with children love to ask this of us childless types, the way evangelicals like to imagine your tearful deathbed repentance or belated contrition in Hell. Since I already regret every other thing I have ever done or failed to do, I don’t see why this decision should be exempt.