I Feel Broken for Not Wanting Kids
The world didn’t teach me what a happy childfree existence looks like — so I will have to teach myself
The world didn’t teach me what a happy childfree existence looks like — so I will have to teach myself
All my life, I have known I didn’t want to have children. And I have always been made to feel freakish about that fact.
When I was young, the adults in my life would talk idly about what it would be like for me someday when I had kids — how I would raise them, what the children might look like. It was presented as an inevitable stage of life I would someday reach, not a choice I’d get to make. Even back then, I would always push back, challenging the assumption that I had to become a parent, declaring categorically that I never wanted to get pregnant.
Most of the time, teachers, career counselors, Girl Scout troop leaders, debate team coaches, and other adults laughed off my protests. With the chilling kind of dismissiveness that masquerades as warmth, they would assure me that someday I’d change my mind. This was another way of saying that being a parent was inevitable. A person could turn their nose up at it and complain all they wanted, but eventually, they’d cave to the pressure. I had no say in the matter. Like death or puberty, having kids was a thing that just happened to you, like it or not.
Of course, we now know that puberty doesn’t have to be a thing that just happens to you. If you fear your coming menses and the spreading of your hips as if you’re staring down a rapidly oncoming train, there might be something going on with you. You might want to talk to a gender therapist or contemplate taking puberty blockers. If the thought of one day getting pregnant — of even being capable of getting pregnant — fills a child with dread and fear, they might need something other than a dismissive remark from an adult. Unfortunately, all I got was the reassurance that someday my womb would expand and my breasts would swell because that was how life worked.
I don’t want kids. I’m not the kid-having type. I have never wanted them and likely never will. And I feel like that makes me a horrible person.
I can’t blame the adults around me for knowing nothing about trans issues at the time. Very few people would have realized back then that my disinterest in pregnancy, puberty, and raising children was, for me, closely tied to not being a woman. Besides, there are a lot of transgender people who do want to have children, including many trans men who don’t see pregnancy as incompatible with their male identities in any way. So I can hardly judge my family and teachers for failing to connect these particular dots in my case.
What I can feel some bitterness about, though, is the way that being a parent was presented to me — not as a trans person, but as a human being. For the first two decades of my life, I knew basically no adults who were child-free by choice. The handful of adults I did know who didn’t have children were generally seen as selfish, immature, or morally suspect. The decision not to have kids was hardly viewed as a legitimate one at all — it was more of a sign of a person’s failure to be appropriately settled and mature. At weddings and funerals and family gatherings, the people with children were celebrated. The newly married or as-yet childless were questioned about when they intended to remedy the situation.
When I was still a little kid, my mom got wise to the fact that I was uninterested in being a parent, and took steps to discuss the topic in a more understanding way. She’d say something about me having kids then affirm it was a choice I was free to make or not make. She would correct herself if she said anything that suggested I was destined to be someone’s mom as a matter of course. It was reassuring and affirming that she saw me for who I was in this way — but decades of social programming from everyone else in my life still did serious damage.
For my whole childhood, the pressure to reproduce was immense, and I was given no visible alternative. This left me grasping for a clear sense of what my adult life could even look like if I chose to resist the inevitability of having kids. I’m still grasping at it now, as an adult in my thirties.
I don’t want kids. I’m not the kid-having type. I have never wanted them and likely never will. And I feel like that makes me a horrible person.
I’ve always found the abstract idea of a child-free existence to be appealing. The problem is, the reality is much more mundane and lonely-seeming.
Growing up, I wanted to be one of those career-oriented, passionately independent people who go on endless adventures and never plants roots. When I used to imagine my future as a scientist, I pictured Jane Goodall living in the forest with her chimps, or Indiana Jones leaving his lecture hall to roam the world with a whip and a gun. I wanted desperately to be that kind of person — untameable, self-assured, and accomplished — far too busy to change somebody else’s diapers.
But as I got older and became more of a genuine adult, I realized life without a family doesn’t actually look that way. I’m not Indiana Jones or Jane Goodall; no actual professional scientist lives the exciting, fast-paced existence I used to picture. And besides, Jane Goodall has kids! She wasn’t just sitting in a tent in the forest for decades. At some point, she went home and spent a thousand sleepless nights with a squalling infant like most mothers do. The wild, exploratory existence I had imagined didn’t exist.
Adult life isn’t as exciting as I once imagined it would be. And being busy doesn’t provide the sense of purpose I assumed it would. Work is grueling and often thankless. Growing older is terrifying, and for many people, it’s very lonely business. Though I have a rich, heavily peopled life at the moment, when I gaze into the future I see decades of unfilled time, stretching onward into nothingness.
At my lowest moments, I lay in bed and cry as I imagine myself dying miserable and alone, consumed with the regret of having lived a vacuous, family-free life. It’s the dark, despair-inducing conclusion to the refrain I was always given as a child — “Oh, you just wait, you’ll change your mind.” The tragic, empty existence I picture is the only answer I have for the question, “And what if I don’t?”
Intellectually I know this is all bullshit. Society taught me that only broken, hateful people fail to have kids, and I simply absorbed those damaging messages then weaponized them against myself.
On paper, I know it is wrong. I would never judge another child-free person in this way. I look at the child-free subreddit and resonate with the people who relish having free time, disposable income, the ability to pack up and move whenever they desire. I read the threads from parents who regret having children, and see echoes of myself in their complaints. I know that if I went that route, I would feel the way they do. Hell, even when I hear happy and satisfied parents discussing what their lives are like I can recognize it’s not the life for me.
I know in my brain that not reproducing is a valid choice, an economically prudent choice, an ecologically responsible one. In my heart, I believe I am a joyless bastard, too frozen and closed off to ever show a tiny human the affection they deserve, too consumed with my own self-absorption to ever truly contribute to another person’s existence. I worry that I am a husk of a human being, a childish, demanding maw, seeking love and entertainment and creature comfort but incapable of paying it back.
I don’t know how to get out of this pit of self-loathing. I know that forcing myself to have kids will not fix it. Unlike the adults who used to undermine me, I recognize that my mind will not change.
A couple of months ago I shared all of these feelings with my therapist. He was the first person in my life who ever really validated these concerns. Usually, when I mention being terrified of ending up all alone, people brush off my fear as unrealistic, or tell me that I’m too young to be worried about it. But my therapist was willing to really grapple with it in concrete terms.
“I think it makes sense for you to start thinking about what you want your life to look like as an older person,” he said. “You should start putting plans in place to help make sure you have the kind of life you want.”
My therapist mentioned an older woman that he knows, who recently moved into a condominium with her straight female best friend. Both women are unmarried and childless; they go on dates with other people but are platonically committed to one another. These women have vowed to look after one another into old age, to go on cruises and backpacking trips together every year for as long as they’re able.
If you don’t plan to lead a conventional life — with a conventional, nuclear family — you have to get creative about where your future is headed. There are no roadmaps for this kind of existence. But adhering to society’s predominant roadmap is no guarantee of comfort and happiness, either. A lot of the people who get married and have kids wind up lonesome and feeling unfulfilled for various reasons, too. It’s foolish to conform to society’s standard life plan just for the sake of not being alone.
The world didn’t teach me what a happy childfree existence looks like, so I will have to teach that to myself.
My therapist acknowledged that it is harder to make new friends and maintain close bonds when you get older. Lots of people get married and have children and slowly disappear from the social sphere. You have to put continuous effort toward experiencing new things and meeting new people as you age and the social dynamics around you shift. It’s in your own hands — a freedom as well as a responsibility. And it’s never too early to start making plans for how to handle that.
That conversation with my therapist left me feeling a lot better. I might have a big, abstract fear of leading a lonesome and meaningless life, and that fear might be pretty damn hard to tame, but it’s not entirely out of my control. I can focus on making very specific, grounded plans for leading a worthwhile life. The world didn’t teach me what a happy child-free existence looks like, so I will have to teach that to myself.
Still, the fears linger. The shame eats away at me if I slow down too much. Humans have children and shower them in affection — it’s what’s normal, it’s what people do. It’s one of the clearest demonstrations of our species’ capacity for love and devotion. In our world dominated by the quest for productivity and wealth, it’s one of the few pure, slow, not-immediately productive endeavors most people find the time in their lives to do.
Much of the time, I feel that I am defective for not finding most kids cute. I often suspect I am an emotionally void robot for deciding that the screaming and the clutter and the spit up and the driving lessons and the parent-teacher conferences are not worth it. We are all supposed to aspire to something greater and larger than ourselves, to devote our short existence to some higher purpose, or so it seems, but I don’t really have one.
I couldn’t find meaning in being a parent even if I tried. Even if I got really scared and broke down and decided to conform, I would fail at it. That’s what really makes it feel like a curse.
In the music video for her song “Cruel,” St. Vincent is kidnapped by a single father and his two children. The family takes her hostage and forces her to pantomime a happy life as a mother and wife. She cooks dinner and brushes her new daughter’s hair; she shaves her husband’s face and dances with him in the living room while the kids watch.
“Can’t you see what everybody wants from you?” the lyrics plead. “If you could want that too, then you’ll be happy.”
By the end of the video, St. Vincent has failed to perform loving, gentle motherhood correctly, so her captors turn on her, and bury her alive in an unmarked grave. The father, the son, and the daughter all pile dirt on top of her while she sings the word “cruel” over and over again, plaintively. The song is written from the perspective of a restrictive, controlling society — it’s not the hostage-taking family that’s being declared cruel, but the insufficiently feminine, insufficiently loving St. Vincent herself. From the perspective of the song’s narrator, she is the one who is broken and flawed — her refusal to want the “right” things is why she is unhappy.
St. Vincent, of course, is not broken. At least, not any more than anybody else. She is an incredibly accomplished artist who has written amazing music about grief, suicidality, drug addiction, and queer identity. Her music videos are stunning and poignant, and help make people like me feel less ruined and more alive. She hasn’t had children, but she’s loved many people, written them love songs and breakup songs and make up songs and more. She’s a person with a rich life, one that doesn’t follow conventions, and it’s easy for me to look at her and say it’s good that she didn’t cave to the pressure to have children. It’s better that she crafted her own fully realized life.
I can say this kind of thing about every child-free person I know — the medical doctors and visual artists, the dog foster parents and mountain climbers, the political activists and avid readers and witches alike. I can believe that everyone else who chooses not to have children is a dynamic, complex, beautiful human, that they are deserving of love and happiness, that they were right to define existence on their own terms.
I just can’t seem to believe that about myself. I hope that someday I can. In the meantime, I will keep making plans and will keep struggling to envision a future that is fully mine, and fully something I can be proud of.