On Being a Childless Cat Lady.
More and more I’m seeing childfree/childless conversations online and I am so happy to see it out in the open. Finally people are starting to understand that not having children is a perfectly valid life choice (for a lot of reasons) and lots of women are living fulfilling lives without kids. (Somehow “childless dog man” is not a thing.) Upfront I want to say that this isn’t a jab at people who’ve chosen to have children. It’s so weird how often parents1 take it really personally when someone is open about intentionally not having kids. Have kids or don’t! Both are valid choices! You both made decisions that work for you and that’s great!
Parents, this isn’t about you. Nobody is choosing to not have kids to make you feel bad, I promise. If I sound a little defensive it’s because a whole bunch of parents have done their very best to make me feel terrible about my choice. Here are the things people have said to me over the years:
Who’ll take care of you when you’re old?
You’ll regret it.
Aren’t you afraid you’ll end up alone?
Maybe if babies came in flavors like praline you’d want one of those too.2
It’s okay to be selfish right now.
Why? Don’t you like kids?
You’ll never know true love until you have children.
Woof. So, obviously I don’t have children but some of you may not know if it was a choice I made or just circumstances. I mean, sort of both? It’s both. When I got married (the first time) at 28 I kind of assumed we’d have kids at some point but neither of us were fired up about it. We both had lots of hobbies that filled our time and we knew lots of other couples who didn’t have kids (and weren’t planning on it.)
As the years went on and I got into my mid-30s I’d check in with my (now ex) husband every so often. Do we want to have kids? Should we talk about it? I didn’t feel ready but I also didn’t want to assume I knew how he felt about it and if he’d been ready, I’d have been on board. Instead he’d say things like “I don’t know about bringing kids into this world” which felt like a cop-out but I didn’t push it.
Finally, at 38 I asked him one more time because, you know, I’m not getting any younger and I needed to settle it in my mind one way or the other. His response was “If you want a baby you need to pay off your credit card debt first.”3 That, my friends, was the final answer I needed and also the beginning of the end of that marriage.
But why tho?
So, no babies for me. But why? Other than not wanting to have a baby with someone who wasn’t into it, the baby fever thing never happened to me. That physical need for a baby? Never felt it. (Okay, maybe once when I held my friend Ethan’s new baby and she smiled at me, but then I handed her back and it went away.) I just never craved babies of my own.
Also, I didn’t have a super great childhood. My parents had an ugly divorce when I was six and I rarely felt like either of my parents put me (or my older sister) first. I struggled with learning disabilities, with being bullied, with trying to make everyone happy and failing miserably. I wasn’t fully neglected but I never felt like I was important either.
This really fucks you up when you finally get into therapy and start examining your people-pleasing tendencies and related anxiety. So, I think my reluctance to have children was partially related to not having the first idea how to be a good parent. I needed to work on taking care of myself and the idea of being fully responsible for an entire other person was just unimaginable.
And then…
I got divorced at 40 and spent the next five years as a single lady living in an apartment with my cat. I dated but there was nobody I was deeply serious about. I often dated guys with kids and I was perfectly fine with that but I did get some suspicion from a few of these men - they didn’t trust my not having kids and one even said he thought women who chose not to have kids were lacking in empathy. Cool story bro. (I broke up with him.)
By the way, none of this means I don’t like kids. I have two nieces and I’m an unofficial aunty to lots of my friend’s kids. I’m not super comfortable around tiny babies (I’m afraid I’ll break them) but I’ve loved watching the kids in my life grow up and evolve from goofy little babies into really interesting, complex people. Kids are cool and I enjoy having them in my life but it never turned into a personal need.
At 45 I met my husband, who was also divorced with no kids (a unicorn!) and now we live a pretty nice life. We aren’t wealthy but we can afford to travel which is something I was never able to do previously. We took our first ever international vacation together in 2019 and we were hooked. I also still have quite a few hobbies that fill my life with joy and adventure. Nothing is missing, no regrets.
So, who will take care of me when I get old? First of all, do not assume your kids will do this. I mean, what a selfish reason to have kids, right? I don’t think this is ever a given. But also, how is friendship never part of the equation? I have lifelong friends that I would never leave to fend for themselves and I’m pretty certain they wouldn’t abandon me either. The inability to see beyond family for community is baffling to me. And if I’m all alone in the end, well, I’m Gen X. I’m used to being left to my own devices.
Not every parent! Certainly not you.
My actual mother said this to me because I had the audacity to ask her to bring me back some macarons from Paris. She was taking this trip with my aunt and cousins and I was not invited.
Yes, I had credit card debt, mostly from having a job that paid crap and owning the saddest, most broke down car imaginable.
I've got two kids, both "grown," and I love them more than life itself, but I will be the first to admit that they make life harder in a lot of different ways. Are there rewards, sure. And again, I love them, but we are in a hard place with both of them right now and so things maybe feel a bit harder than at others. I feel like this is a safe space where they won't see my comments, so I can say that there are times I've had "Sliding Doors" fantasies (iykyk) of what my life would have been like had I not had them.
I have three kids and while I do not regret having them, I do regret swallowing the BS that you get married, you buy a house, you have kids because what else is there? I regret that no one tells you to heal your generational trauma first. There's only talk of diapers and sleepless nights, not of the bigger issues you'll deal with later. Bullying, sexual abuse, depression, their failures and struggles that break your heart (but you put on a smile), letting them go. My kids have all told me they don't want to have kids, for varied reasons, and at first, I was hurt (thinking I was such a horrible mom that they didn't want to be the same way to their kids) but now I get it. The world is on fire and instead of vilifying childfree people, maybe we should thank them for both their population control and for their understanding that we. cannot. go. on. as. we. have. Resources are not infinite and we are failing the children already on this planet every single day. How many more have to be born just to die in a classroom, or of neglect, or in war?