I have so many thoughts. I didn’t know I had so many thoughts. One way to sort of start this is, like when I got married, the question started immediately, if not before, when people found out that we were getting married. Like, when are you gonna have kids? This is at work. Where I worked with kids. So, definitely the women of older generation were asking this question a lot. And when I would respond, , I don’t think we’re going to have kids, they would respond with, well, you’ll figure it out, or you’ll change your mind later or something. And , I was mid thirties when we got married.
So this assumption that we don’t know ourselves, that we don’t know what we want, that it’s an immature decision, or that it’s selfish, is just so not the case. Um, I put so much thought into it.
I also was not somebody who wanted to have kids growing up. Like I had a baby doll who looked like a real baby. Her name was Lissey, wherever that came from, I have no idea. But she was like life size. I was not her mother. I was her babysitter or her big sister, or whatever. I was her caregiver, but I was not her mother. I don’t consider myself my dog’s mother. Like, I’m her big sister, I’m her babysitter. I don’t know. That is still really very true for me.
Additionally, I was raised Christian. I’ve been really processing this lately. I’ve done a lot of therapy. There’s a lot of re-parenting of myself that’s been happening in the last decade. But I was raised Christian in a community that was very liberal but there was a lot of perfectionism and a lot of pressure around how are you the best woman that you can be. And so I think that I always thought that I would change my mind also because of that, that like surely at some point I’ll be more like all these people that I’m surrounded with and clearly the, this is the best way to live my life, even though I think I knew at a young age that that was not what I wanted.
And then the last thing I’ll add in there is the moments of judgment. I mentioned my sister, who has two kids, she’s three years older than me. And in the same way of growing up in a church community where there was a lot of perfectionism, there was also a ton of that in my home growing up. A lot of complex dynamics there. In my family of origin, everybody needs to be the same. Everybody needs to have the same hair. Everybody needs to like the same things. Everybody needs to be vegetarian. Everybody needs to be the same. It’s very culty. It’s not good. And so this pressure from my sister to be like her as a reflection that she has made the right choices has been really hard for me to accept that this is what I want and that I feel good about this. She actually said to me, “If you have even a small inkling that you want to have a child, you should just go for it. You should just do it.” And I really, really deeply, disagree with that. I think that you should really want to have a child if you’re gonna do, it changes your whole life and a child should be wanted.
So many problems in our world come I think from people who had really traumatic upbringings or were unwanted by their own parents. And so I think my way of dealing with those kinds of comments, not only from my sister but from other people, is just to get out of that conversation as soon as possible. Just deflect, change the subject, whatever. And I want to going forward, have a more direct answer. That’s something I think I’m still kind of working on.