Love is ... life without the pitter-patter of tiny feet (Angry Feminist alert!)

Sydney Morning Herald ^ | 1/2/2 | Rachel Roberts

[dead]

Is it really so hard to understand, asks Rachel Roberts, that there can be more to a couple's relationship than having children?

I am one of a growing number of women who will elect not to have children. And at least in my experience, the decision to not have children isn't one that is met with much enthusiasm.

From the family, there are comments like "But don't you want us all to have kids playing together at birthday parties and barbecues?" and "I've just always thought that part of a couple's life together is having a family".

From friends, there are protests like "But you'd make such great parents!" or "You've had such a good family life, don't you want to re-create that yourself?"

On the whole, though, the standard response is scepticism. Brush-offs. "Oh, you say that now, but wait till you turn 30!" And "I thought that, too, when I was your age but, trust me, that biological clock really gets you."

Well, I am fast approaching 30 and I have never been surer that I don't want children. My partner feels the same. We have thought about it a lot and have decided time and again that no, it's not for us. We don't want to be woken up at all hours to attend a screaming infant that knows only the need to suck. We don't want to sacrifice our time and energy chasing death-defying toddlers or taxiing around teenagers who have recently learnt to hate us.

More importantly, neither of us (me, especially) wants to see my body torn asunder during childbirth. We already love our life the way it is, child-free. And that is why the brush-off response interests me the most.

It's as though those who either have, or some day want, children refuse to recognise other possibilities in life. They are mentally closing off to paths different from their well-worn one. Particularly for women, it seems that in the face of all political and cultural change, we can always rely on some things staying the same.

Thirty years on from second-wave feminism, people are still incredulous of the woman who declares she doesn't want to be a mother.

Feminists have long argued that the social and political resistance to women who choose to remain child-free reflects a far deeper cultural anxiety about what is expected of women. Traditional femininity is inextricably bound up with notions of mothering, nurturance and birth.

Since day dot, motherhood has been viewed as the natural female career. And now, thanks to an enduring belief in biological determinism, the desire to bear children continues to be seen in terms of instinct, as a drive that is universally hard-wired into the female psyche. To be a normal woman, we must at least want children, even if for some reason we cannot have them.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you say, we've all done Feminism 101 - tell us something we don't know. Well, having experienced the reactions couples meet when revealing that they do not want children, I suspect there is something more at play than simply challenging the traditional ideology that surrounds women. Certainly a woman who elects not to have children is treading a less orthodox path. However, it's not just the woman's decision to not have children that disturbs convention, but the man's as well. As partners they upset traditional understandings of what heterosexual love is about. Why do I think this? Well, when was the last time any of us saw a romantic film where one lover whispers to the other "I love you so much, darling, I never want to have your baby!" It just wouldn't seem right.

From wedding ceremonies to popular culture, we are saturated with the idea that children are the symbol of a man and woman's love for each other. Undoubtedly the outcome of their physical union, children are moreover portrayed as the embodiment of a couple's emotional bond. The place where a man and woman's DNA and souls enmesh.

Having children remains integral to our contemporary mythology of love and desire, and those couples who reject parenthood disappoint our romantic expectations. They let us down by not making what is seen as the ultimate declaration of heterosexual love.

So perhaps that is why society shrugs off couples who don't want children. Perhaps the sceptical comments from family and friends reflect an unwillingness to accept romantic defeat. At the very least, it shows a distinct lack of imagination when it comes to recognising signs of love.

After all, for couples like us, the real romance is in being child-free.

Rachel Roberts is a freelance writer.

[austinTparty]

Tell me again after your daughter goes through her early teens. Kids are still cute when they are that age.

Loving when they're cute is easy, it's true (even if at this age they write on walls, destroy furniture and seek danger with the surety of a guided missile). But you don't know the FULL meaning of love until they try your patience sorely, tell you they hate you, hate to be seen anywhere near you, do everything they can to alienate you... I think it's at that moment when they need love the most, although it is the hardest (Having been a 13-year-old girl, I can say this with some degree of certainty :-).

[kevman]

thank you! i am a single guy who has no desire to have children. i am also pro-life and i have no desire to get married. i have two nieces who i adore, but frankly in small doses. they are wonderful, well behaved kids, but even acknowledging that, i am frankly glad when i leave that family function. i think the woman that wrote this original article is a b*tch, but at least she is honest. i have never understood why it is that people that are either married and have kids or do not feel it is their duty to instruct the happy single and or childless how we should live our lives.

[Geezerette]

I really respect your honesty! Not all people have the child-rearing instinct or desire. I know I never did. My Mother would say to me, "If you're smart, you will have a career and don't have kids!" I never did. I don't know if it was for that reason. I was born during the Depression of the 30's ... maybe that had something to do with the way my Mother felt.

But what I really want to say here is that I have seen so many grandmothers (my age) who are either raising their grandchildren or partially tending them because of the failed marriages or failed lives of their own children. These grandmothers don't envy me, I am sure, as they love their grandchildren. But I see how financially and emotionally strapped they are at times, and probably this will be their way of life until they die. So sad.

Maybe I am a selfish person. I just know that I have no regrets for the way my life has turned out. I really don't think I would have been a good mom to another person.

I started reading this thread early on when it started, but there were no people on it who would agree with me, so I kept quiet.

g

[willyboyishere]

I reckon she'll eventually get the hankering to fulfill her own (and the species') biological destiny and have a child around the time she realizes she doesn't have anything original to say. I don't find her bitter, though, just "protesting too much", and whistling in the dark from a posture of defensiveness.

[joathome]

"Tell me again after your daughter goes through her early teens. Kids are still cute when they are that age."

Your thinking is a product of our times. I do not expect my teens to be obnoxious. Do you really think the teens of 1940 were as obnoxious as the teens of today? (Ya' know, when gum chewing and running down the hall were major problems in school....not guns and sex?)

I've raised two children through young adulthood (21 and almost 20), and they have been a joy since the day they were born. I expect the same with the rest of my kids. Should one cause me grief, it will be unexpected, but that is getting back to my point. Problem kids should come as an unexpected shock, not as one of life's inevitabilities.

[Romulus]

Contraception not only degrades the act by removing its essential potency, it precludes the conjugal act from fulfilling its essential nature of total self-giving and receiving.

A happy and haply providential correspondence with that other three-way relationship that "disrupts the 'you-me' construct by introducing a third element: one that opens onto the 'we' of authentic communion, in which each person can flourish. The 'I' is no longer affirmed over against the 'you'; it is affirmed, rather, through sharing whatever is unique in each one." (pp.203-5)

[Dumb_Ox]

Love is ... life without the pitter-patter of tiny feet

What a contrast to this Galway Kinnell poem:

"After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman and Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one   flash, but let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake and make for it on the run -- as now, we lie together, after making love, quiet, touching along the length of   our bodies, familiar touch of the long-married, and he appears -- in his baseball pajamas, it happens, the neck opening so small he has to screw them on -- and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles   himself to sleep, his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child. In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across this little, startingly muscled   body -- this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground   of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.

[beaversmom]

The eco-nut feminists are the worst ones. We've got a few of them in Colorado--mainly in the Boulder area.

[MistrX]

Those who do not have children, do not know.

[steve-b]

You called me (and others who are perfectly happy not to have children) "flawed," and when I asked you how this made me flawed, this is viewed by you as an attack?

Yep. It's kind of like how those wascawwy Wepubwicans "attacked" Clinton just because he broke dozens of laws.

[steve-b]

Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it

Mission Completed. Next?

[steve-b]

You are equating choice in wine (one's tastes in alcohol) with deciding whether or not to raise children (one of the primary experiences of human life).

Ah, ah, ah -- you are not allowed to use the conclusion (that raising children is "one of the primary experiences of human life") as one of the steps in your argument.

[steve-b]

Note to author, they just don't want you to miss out on something so awesome and life changing for the best as having a child ie they care about you.

If I knew that a man was coming over to my house with the fixed intention to do me good, I would run for my life.
  --Henry David Thoreau

(Personally, I'd put up a defensive perimeter rather than run, but that's just me.)

[steve-b]

Those of us with children will have to listen to other peoples' opinions for a lifetime.

Er, you don't have to do any such thing. You can grow a spine and inform them (as subtly as you like or as firmly as you must) that the matter is none of their business.

[Free Vulcan]

I know two people, including my sister who's 29, who don't want kids. Not however with the kind of hostility and narcisism that the writer displays. That woman is severely warped.

[wwjdn]

I would like to thank her for her decision. She is a hateful, selfish, immoral person who shoudl not have children. Based on the article I read. Let her miss out on the joys of children, and die an old hag.

[steve-b]

they not only reject Life loud and clear -- seeking to plan it and partake of it only on their own terms

This has got to be one of the silliest statements I've ever read on FR. It is the essential nature of sapient humanity to plan and partake of life on man's own terms -- that's why man lives in houses instead of caves.

[steve-b]

"Freedom" does not consist in rendering one's choices moot of consequence.

On the contrary, taking steps to avoid possible consequences is another result of human intelligence. Prudent people choose to use cars -- and seat belts.

[ArrogantBustard]

You don't know what is really going on.

You, dear, don't know me from Adam, so don't preach to me. I sympathise with your problem. Really. But don't try to give me some snow job about how the legions of ill-behaved, undisciplined brats running amok in otherwise polite society are all the victims of some legitimate medical problem. They aren't, and you know it. In some cases, I'm talking about members of my own family; I know precisely what is, and what isn't going on.

As for my own (mis)behaviour? I certainly did not run around restaurants screaming as loud as possible. Nor did I exhibit such behaviour in department stores, groceries, etc. I did not openly defy my parents in their face and to their despite, and expect to get away with it. The few times I tried it, I quickly learnt the folly of such ways. Likewise whining, begging, crying, and throwing tantrums. The few children with legitimate medical problems, who literally can't control themselves, are neither excuse nor explanation for the legions of spoiled brats whose parents are too lazy, stupid, or self-centred to properly teach them.

AB

[steve-b]

I don't care if she's said no to a family its her attitude about it thats disgusting.

It seems to be a natural reaction to an endless parade of busy-bodies pestering her on the subject.