I’m still giving my arm a rest, so I have an excuse for writing this post as a blurt rather than trying to make it lengthy and full of argument and example.
I am childless by choice. This is largely because I have no maternal instinct. I have simply never wanted children. I’ve never found this to be a cause for worry, shame or deep self-inquiry. It’s how I am, and I can’t imagine being different.
Still, I’ve had cause this week to wonder whether this aspect of my nature is entirely inborn, or whether I might have been more interested in motherhood if our society did not punish mothers psychologically and economically, and if mothers were not hounded and harassed by morality police of every stripe.
I will never know the answer to that question, and it doesn’t matter to me. I am happy as I am. Nonetheless, it remains that the hypocrisy of a culture which looks askance at intentional childlessness, while treating mothers like shit, deserves the harshest derision.
God, I couldn’t agree with you more. I come from an enormous family and have seen enough of childrearing and the toll it takes on parents, especially mothers. I have no desire for children of my own (but am constantly told that I will change my mind someday). My parents are currently going through a divorce and my mother, who has been a mother and housewife her entire adult life, has nothing to fall back on. Society expects her to be able to get a job and support herself after spending thirty years raising children in the home. We still expect mothers to give their entire lives to their children, but once the kids are all grown up mothers are supposed to spontaneously evolve into liberated, self-sufficient, post-feminist women. It is a disgusting hypocrisy and I will never know, either, if I don’t want children because I genuinely have no interest in them, or if I am just afraid of the mould motherhood would try to force me in to.
I’m very sorry to hear about your parents and the consequences for your mother.
> We still expect mothers to give their entire lives to their children, but once the kids are all grown up mothers are supposed to spontaneously evolve into liberated, self-sufficient, post-feminist women.
Or even before they grow up — reading about the end to Parenting Payment when the youngest child is six or eight. And there seems to be an assumption that people are all healthy and well-located, too, with no extra carer duties for elderly or otherwise needy relatives.
> or if I am just afraid of the mould motherhood would try to force me in to.
I have feared that mould. I like to think I’d resist it, but perhaps I don’t like our society so much that I’d want to create another person in order to share it with them. Whenever I’ve thought (hypothetically) about being a parent, my mind has turned to homeschooling, perhaps on a rock in the Outer Hebrides. I don’t know how big an influence that has been on my choice either, though.