-
When I first met my now wife in 2012, she told me she never wanted to get pregnant.
-
In our 30s, we talked about adoption, not wanting to have a newborn, and sleepless nights.
-
I don’t want to be a parent and I would like to spend my time doing other things.
When we first met in 2012, my wife said she never wanted to have children due to health issues.
Perhaps, like many young people in our early twenties, we have still left open the possibility that, years later, when we were versions of ourselves that we could not yet imagine ourselves being, we would develop a desire – a need , an instinct, a calling, whatever it is that makes someone want to grow older – we didn’t have that back then.
In 2015, years later on that proverbial road, we were driving 300 miles from Alabama to New Orleans for a couples weekend when my wife realized halfway through the trip that she had forgotten her birth control at home, so we pulled over. off the highway, searched her luggage and briefly but intensely thought back to the question of whether we wanted to have children. Or rather, whether we wanted to risk a pregnancy that could derail the kind of life we hoped for. Our response was to turn the car around and collect the pills.
We are childfree by choice
With another decade in the rearview mirror, I’m inclined to say nothing has changed. After all, we are still, by choice, childless. One thing that is definitely different now, though, is my ability to articulate why that is: I don’t want to be a parent.
As a young newlywed, the tension of not wanting children lay not in the decision itself, but in the feeling that I would inevitably have to justify it when the subject came up with family, colleagues, acquaintances, or friends. After getting married, you find out that people, even strangers, tend to ask about things like that.
In my bolder moments, I tended to fall back on things like the climate crisis and the impending collapse of civilization as reasons why I didn’t want to bring a child into this world. The reasoning seemed unassailable. Maybe, I reasoned, if the world were somehow different—somehow better, more just, more secure—then I would think differently about it, too.
We talked about adoption in our 30s
As our twenties came to an end and we entered the era of our thirties, it became a fact that there would be no more biological children in our future. Still, the possibility of adoption popped up every now and then. In theory, it eliminated the physical risk of having to carry or give birth to a child, two things that understandably terrified my wife.
We even reasoned that adopting a child would give us the chance to completely skip the sleepless phase of a newborn and the terrible twos that our friends with children had talked about with something akin to shell shock.
However, our conversations about adoption were never really about wanting children. Instead, I think they were echoes of the same conversations we’d been having since we first met, trying to reconcile the possibility of our future selves with who we were and who we’d become and perhaps who we’d always be had been. been.
If there is a meaningful distinction to be found between having children and parenthood, it may be entirely semantic. While having children implies the act of bearing and perhaps raising children as a kind of finite endeavor with a finish line stretching along the path to adulthood, parenting emphasizes that the obligation is a lifelong one. It’s not that I’m particularly scared, although that’s part of it; it has more to do with the fact that time is limited and precious, and I would like to spend mine in a different way.
Realizing that I don’t want to be a parent has been enlightening, if only because figuring out what we don’t want often sharpens our heartfelt desires.
I don’t want to be a parent, but I want to be a supportive husband. I want to spend the rest of my life with my wife. I want us to grow old together. I want us to feel in the daily rhythm of our relationship the evidence of the love that brought us together and made visible the possibility of the life we now share.
Read the original article on Business Insider
