NYMPHE: Childless, Childfree, Parent, Stepmom.

Toronto Childless-not-by-choice folks...

A Vancouver-based freelance journalist is looking to interview women in Toronto who are childless due to life circumstances (not by choice). Email marysezeidler@gmail.com if you want to help.

 

I don't know Mary, but she emailed me asking to spread the word.

Mother's Day for Everyone

For every son who cannot bring his mom breakfast in bed. Every daughter who grieves for the baby she never bore. For every mother whose child can't thrust a bunch of wilted dandelions in her hand and say, "Happy Mubba Day."

For those whose mothers passed away. For those who never met their moms. Those whose mamas are ill.

For those whose children passed away. Those who never met the children they wanted to birth. Who miscarried. Who put their child up for adoption. For those whose children left the house at 16 and never came back. For those whose sons are ill, whose daughters are fighting in Afghanistan, whose babies never celebrated their first birthdays.

For the almost-stepmoms who receive no roses on Mother's Day. For the stepmothers who receive no roses on Mother's Day. For the aunties and grandmas and friends and nurses and social workers who help raise the kids and receive no roses on Mother's Day.

For those whose mothers are addicted, angry, narcissistic, depressed, bipolar, abusive, too timorous to stand up for their children. For those who wish they had a tight or real or significant or nice or peaceful or loving relationship with their mothers... but they don't, and they probably won't.

For those whose children are addicted, angry, narcissistic, depressed, bipolar, abusive, estranged, dismissive, self-destructive. Those mothers who wish they had a tight or real or significant or nice or peaceful or loving relationship with their children... but they don't, and they probably won't.

For everyone who struggles through Mother's Day: beams, prayers, wishes, hope, and love to you. You are not alone.

Let's Hear It for Aunties, Loud & Clear

For some bizarre reason, the New York Times won't allow commenting and conversation on this article. Too bad, because it might get some good stuff going!

The piece celebrates childless/childfree aunts. Yay, childless and childfree aunties! It's less snarcastic than my piece on the same subject was for Bust and Utne. It's nice. It's equal handed. Has a very strange ending that requires elaboration or, even better, should've been cut. Anyway, enjoy it here:

Let's Hear it for Aunthood from Style section, NY Times, Sunday Sept 19.

"Traffic" by Kristy Athens

Good writing and good illustration and good collage and yes it deals with what some people go through when they cannot have babies and remember we never know how things are going to work out, even the ones that seem to be happy endings.

Traffic.

Parenting: How I Failed to Lose My Identity

This post is not safe for the grieving childless.*

Having a young child sucks the You out of you. This is my impression from listening to parents (particularly women) talk and reading their words. It's also my impression from conversations with the childless and childfree people, of whom I was one a short time ago. When you have a baby, I figured, your own life is over. You become a moo cow in the Joycean sense and the nearly literal sense. You can't talk about anything but poop. You bore everyone with ceaseless chatter about preschools, or daycare, not that I know what the difference is. You stop doing the things you always loved.

Have you lost your Self yet? This was the first question I got in email from one of my readers after having Gustav last September. I got asked it again recently. I suppose it says something about my new life, that it took me half a year to answer a question, but I'm not sure it says anything too awful.

I'm not that far into the process of parenting a baby, though I've got ten years and counting as a half-time stepmama of a girl now 14 years old. Neither experience has sucked the Me out of me, at least not  yet. Adjusting to family life did change my identity, but then again, most people have major identity changes during their thirties. Maybe the difference with parenting an infant is that the change is so abrupt and so intense.

One day you're a hip young thing traveling the world and going out all night. You have a band or a theatre group or a cool job that defines you. You have a hot sex life and spend loads of time skiing or writing or collecting stamps. Next thing you know, you're saddled with an enormous belly or a crazed toddler, home early every evening. For me personally, though? The change was gradual.

That's because step-parenting is a gateway drug. It's not like mainlining heroin and becoming instantly addicted, your life changing nearly overnight. Meeting your future stepchild is more like being offered your first cigarette. Maybe you think it tastes good, maybe it makes you barf, but you still come back for more. In my case, within a year of meeting my future stepdaughter I was definitely hooked, ready to buy a vintage Zippo and a cigarette case.

And so the Self and my identity had a chance to change slowly. Was I the sort of person who had deeply moving, thrilling times scrabbling in the sand with a little kid at the Oregon Coast or holding a five-year-old's hand while we try to find the restrooms at Mt. Tabor park? I wouldn't have thought so. Turned out I was wrong: those were wonderful, rich experiences, funny ones too. What did it mean that I'd rather stay in, have dinner at 6 pm on the dot, sing a lullaby, and watch a movie with my boyfriend than go to Karaoke from Hell or drink too much wine whilst watching other people get coked out at an after-hours aging Goth party? Did it mean I was hideously boring? Or was I finally growing up like a normal person?

I had to start integrating this weird new version of me with the version I already knew: the obsessive writer, zinester, improv musician, longtime Net nerd, political arguer and activist, bloodletting performance artist, traveling chick. Could all these identities coexist in me? I wasn't sure. It seemed possible, though. I'd always had a strong domestic side, one that liked to come out and play in untraditional venues, like cooking a classic Thanksgiving dinner in a rundown warehouse. I loved cooking, geeking out, sitting around writing, and hanging out with friends, all of which seemed compatible with my new stepmotherly life. I still had the freedom to head off to Southeast Asia for a while or do an artist's residency in the woods, and when my stepdaughter stayed with her mom every other week, my then-boyfriend and I could go on dates or I could run off with my friends.

The real test came at her first soccer game. She was going to meet the team she hoped to join, and the other parents were busy, so I volunteered to take her. We walked uncomfortably across the wet grass, me thinking of Talking Heads lyrics—"and you may ask yourself, how did I get here?"—while she was thinking, "I don't know anyone here! This sucks!" We shambled up to the sidelines, she in her funky spec frames and pink striped hair, me in fire engine red hair under a black hoodie, like two misfits going to a preppie party. I had to laugh, had to acknowledge that I related to my eight-year-old girl more than to what I imagined "real" parents must feel. Surely they would recognize me for the impostor I was.

But as we approached, my stepdaughter recognized a girl from her summer art camp, and off they went, squealing happily. I met the other girl's mom, who was really cool, and shook hands with the coaches. I didn't feel like that much of an alien, and to my surprise, the "real" parents didn't seem like aliens to me, either. They were just people. People with children, like the Free To Be song says.

My stepdaughter was this incredible little person who added to my life and identity, rather than chipping away at the Me in me. She augmented it, like any good friend would, and I hope I augmented hers. Having to look at myself as a Soccer Stepmom freaked the hell out of me, but letting that self-image change do its thing was a tiny, tiny price to pay for this creative and adventurous life with my new family. Plus, my friend Richard deemed me a "SMILF," which cracked me up.

I've had a whole decade of sliding into familyness and altered identity. Even without my husband and stepdaughter, I'd have changed during that long ten years; I'd have struggled with some other identity transition. And now there is the baby. My person and my time are overtaken by intense baby-raising, make no mistake. Somehow, though, I'm still writing for money, editing a magazine, and preparing an art show that goes up at Cooley Gallery later in the year. While I'm blissing out with a little baby sleepily feeding in my arms, I gaze out the window and think big ol' deep thoughts—which is truly wonderful, being forced to slow down, and to me, enforced slowing down is essential to writing and thinking. Other times, I'm devouring the New Yorker or reading a fabulous book, like Lidia Yuknavitch's new memoir. All day, I'm making up wacky-ass songs for someone who doesn't speak English; frankly, it doesn't seem all that different from singing with a band.

In some ways, this newish, baby-mama me is less a new identity than a return to an older one. I feel deeply and solidly like Me, not just the adult Me I determinedly turned myself into, but the vanilla Me I knew when I was a child. The Me who spent hours in nature every day, often alone, playing with animals and picking flowers and walking, walking, walking. The Me who read a shit-ton of books and sometimes had to be forced to go outside for the nature and walking and stuff. The Me who felt a shimmering energy in every tree, every person, every gust of wind. The Me who began to understand how dark and inconsolable the world was, but who consistently dragged herself out of melancholia's mire and cynicism's dry well. The Me who was very sentimental, very sappy, cried easily, cared too much rather than too little. Plain old Me, no more interesting or boring than anyone else, just a small person wandering a large planet.

Of course, I'm experiencing this new/old Me a mere seven months after Gustav's birth. The baby's recent sleep problems aremmaking me stupid and nutty; I begin to understand why parents bitch so much about raising their babies. They've completely lost their minds. Sleep deprivation is a torture device, after all (and I have no idea why evolution or God or nature or whatever would come up with this whole "human parents won't sleep for three years!" idea...). Apparently things get much more exhausting when the kids start walking and talking, too. Maybe I will be a Mommy Zombie with nothing else to discuss or care about in two years. I'm willing to take that chance.

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*And another disclaimer: All my posts here are about my personal experience unless otherwise indicated. In other words, if I were to say, "Getting a new kitten is so delightful, even though she won't stop yowling," it would NOT be a judgement against anyone who hadn't gotten a new cat lately, or didn't plan to, or who really doesn't care for felines. It would not be a condemnation against owners of yowling cats, nor an implication that all cats are hideous yowlers. Readers are responsible for their own cats. Thank you.

Childless-or-free & Parents: Always the Twain Shall Meet

Babble.com ran a nice piece by a woman in the city whose next door neighbors—on the other side of thin walls—had a baby. A screaming, loud baby. But it's not an anti-breeder or anti-kid rant, just a thoughtful story about, well, life. Read Jami Attenberg's piece here...

 

AFTER. Question #1: How's it going?

This post is not safe for the grieving childless. Disclaimer: All my posts here are about my personal experience unless otherwise indicated. In other words, if I were to say, "Getting a new haircut made me feel amazing," it would NOT be a judgement against anyone who hadn't gotten a haircut lately, or didn't plan to, or who finds haircuts super-duper-unamazing. Readers are responsible for their own haircuts. Thank you.

I just got an email from a reader, asking about how things have been since I had a baby. And a number of people have asked how all my former childfree assumptions (and fears) have played out so far.

Well, I feel trepidatious posting about all that here, even though it's my danged blog and I already went through a bunch of previous stuff here trying to figure out whether to shut it down when I got pregnant. Anyway: I plan to answer some of the questions in a few posts, coming up.

#1: Hey, how's it going?

Fucking fabulous. I love it. I love it a lot more than I thought I would. Raising an infant. It's awesome. I'm happy.

 

MOVING BEYOND GRIEF: Advice from Sugar

My blog nattering may be helpful now and again, but I'm no Sugar on The Rumpus. Freaking great, amazing stuff. This Sugar post discusses grief, miscarriage, depression, and abused teens---yet it is compassionate, practical, and realistic. It's not depressing at all.

Grieving? In the stuck place? Click that link and go read. Now. And here is a quote:

"You will never stop loving your daughter. You will never forget her. You will always know her name. But she will always be dead. Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live though it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you."

My Fault, I'm Female...

MFIF—My Fault, I'm Female—is collecting everyday stories about how we are mistreated and belittled for being girls and women. Shouldn't be any big news to anyone who's been a chick for very long, but it makes for a strangely addictive read.

This post talks about being flipped out on by a very-breeding guy because the writer is female and CFBC (childfree by choice). 

(Photo is of me and Carrie in a high school play approximately 4.5 billion light-years ago...)

ALL JOY, NO FUN: CHILDFREE & CHILDED VIEWS TO PERUSE

Is parenting like being an ex-patriot or showing horses? Folks from across the spectrum weigh in, following The New York magazine article "All Joy and No Fun" by Jennifer Senior. The piece has stirred up conversation about whether parenting makes people "happy" or miserable, and makes [some of] us look at what the heck "happiness" is in the first place. How some others are responding to the piece:

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Sarah Wildman, a foreign policy correspondent, likens parenting to being an ex-patriot, where everything is more intense compared to the previous, childless/childfree life:

"When we were expats we liked to say the intensity of experience was different, different from living at home. Living in another language, in another culture, sharpened our senses. When things went wrong, they went disastrously, horribly wrong. But when they were right, the reward was so much sweeter.
Having a kid is a little like being an expat in the world—the highs are that much higher, the lows that much lower, the intensity like nothing else. Joy and pain; tears and laughter; everything that much sharper than it was before."

Read more at politicsdaily.com, where you can't make comments unless you're signed in as an AOL or AIM user. Not Facebook, not Google, freakin' AOL. (Wtf? Who the hell is an AOL user these days?)

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Rufus Griscom, a co-founder of Babble, sent writer Biz Mitchell on assignment to find out how previous studies worked, studies that consistently showed higher levels of "happiness" among childless/childfree people, or among eventual parents before having kids and during times of life when the kids get more independent.

"Biz did indeed find a silver lining, carefully extracted from Gilbert and his fellow gloomy scientists, and it was as follows: though average happiness goes down when you have kids, experiences of extreme pleasure and pain increase. In effect, by having kids you are re-submitting your life to the turbulent intensity — the highs and lows — of earlier phases of life."

Griscom's new article is here on Babble:    where a commenter called tableforthree also says, "For me, parenting is sort of like travel. There's a lot of suffering when you travel, but the moments of transcendence and discovery more than make up for the time stuck in airports."

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Writer Elizabeth Mitchell ("Biz", I assume), delved into issues of happiness and parenting—and took on the dismal studies—in "Are you happy? Are you sure? Parents claim to enjoy their kids; researchers say they're deluded" way back in 2006 on Babble. The article is thorough and entertaining.

"And maybe having children never actually promised happiness. We misunderstood all those cooing grandparents when they said they were so happy for us. They truly meant that they were happy, not you. They were happy you were finally going to be broken of your tenacious selfishness." Ha, that's pretty good. Misery loves company!

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Amanda Hess of Sexist Beatdown and Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown swap some lighthearted, occasionally interesting tidbits about the NY mag article at the Washington City Paper. The piece's intro starts strong, noting that feminist women writers have long bemoaned the drudgery of parenthood, whereas now that men often share the day-to-day miseries, suddenly it's big news that parenting can be a drag.

The comments on this piece are far more thoughtful and thought-provoking than the usual Internet childfree-versus-parenting fare, which is quite nice to see. Too bad the meat of the article tends to brush over real issues in favor of self-congratulatory humor about being childfree. Here are some of the good nuggets:

Amanda: 'I think the happiness part is some new-agey conception of raising children. It’s important to remember that joy aside, the fact is that now a lot of people get to choose whether they have children or not, and if so, when. And so it becomes much more of a quality-of-life question than a biological-necessity one. And so I think it’s fair to expect that you do the thing that you think will make you the happiest. But there’s also a lot of fear-mongering about that, because of that whole ovary-loss thing. So people are like, “If you don’t have kids now, you will never be happy and you’ll regret it for the rest of your life!” And people on the other end are like, “Once you pop it out, there’s no turning back! Life-ruiner!” When, actually, I bet that a lot of people could find meaningful, happy lives doing either of those things.'

Sady: 'I think it’s worth noting that a ton of the parents interviewed, who were speaking most directly about being unhappy and frustrated, were women. Men in that article were mostly “experts,” even if they were also fathers.'

Sady again: 'But I’m also wondering if being told that children are the KEY TO HAPPINESS (if you are a woman) has to do with the disappointment (among women) that children don’t auto-fulfill you? I mean, Simone de Beauvoir talked about this. Her whole deal was that women are told having children will fulfill them, and then it doesn’t, and then they hate their children. Her solution: Make something else in your life more important than getting pregnant?'

Amanda again: 'The story did mention that the most unhappy parents of all were those who were the non-custodial parent (mostly fathers). So having a kid and not raising it? Depressed for life. Having a kid and raising it too much? Also depressed—single parents and moms in general were less happy. Solution: Move to Norway?'

One of their commenters, Rachel in WY: 'to me it’s funny that people don’t conclude from studies like this: the cultural expectations we have are really fucked when it comes to parenting, and especially mothering. Instead, in this narrative it’s the kids themselves that make you unhappy.'

Adds commenter PD: 'In my case, it took me a while to come to the conclusion that I wanted children. I spent a long time agonizing over all the possible issues that could come up when raising children, and debating with myself over whether I was willing and able to handle them. It took my husband maybe a week to come to the same conclusion, and he’s been very serene about it because, I believe, he just hasn’t thought about it very much.'

Says commenter Socrates, a dad: 'If you spend parenting time obsessing that you could be doing something else, well it is hardly surprising you won’t enjoy it. Happiness is a choice a lot of the time.' (Typepad seems to be barfing out on this formatting. My apologies if it comes out weird.)

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Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, wrote Stumbling on Happiness, a book that clearly illustrates how kids bum out their parents around toddlerhood and teenagehood, even though parents say that parenting has made their lives happier. "When they replicate this study in France," says Gilbert to Mitchell, "women in France are not quite as unhappy when they are interacting with their children as women in the United States. We could imagine in some cultures it's not true at all.

"The differences aren't genetic differences. They are cultural differences, and one cultural difference is that in most of Western Europe people are not living lives that are quite as — what shall we call them — professionally frenzied? Running to the job in the morning, coming home at night, both parents working night and day. People in Europe are a little more relaxed and are able to spend more time with their families. And if children were really a source of agony, then the more time you spend with them the worse you would feel.

"But it turns out that people who have a little more time to spend with their kids are happier with them. Which once again points to the problem being conflict, which is not that children make us unhappy it's that doing too much makes us unhappy."

These interview snippets come from the same Mitchell article above, on Babble.

While I'm pretty sick of any sentence involving the word "should" these days, I appreciate Gilbert's assessment that "Being a parent lowers your average daily happiness. But average daily happiness isn't all there is to be said about happiness. Indeed one could make the case that average happiness across a day isn't what we're trying for. As human beings, it's not our aim. It shouldn't be our goal.

"What we should be looking for is special transcendent moments that may even come at the cost of a lower average. In my own experience that's probably not a bad description of a day with a kid." Since the article is about parenting, he doesn't note that these kinds of experiences are frequently felt by non-parents who take on challenging situations: not light and fun in every moment, but unbeatably worthwhile in the bigger picture.

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...which is pretty much what I noted on Nymphe in "Meaning & Bigtime Satisfaction vs. Moment-to-Moment Happiness."

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Columnist Bonnie Erbé's article "Childless? Heck No—Child-free!" provides a non-parent point of view on politicsdaily's site. Unfortunately, it breaks little new ground for anyone who follows these issues. The word childless is a sucky way to describe people? Yep, we knew that. People treat you weird if you're childfree/childless by choice in a pronatal, family-centric culture? Yep, knew that too, especially if you're female.

Many childfree people would trade their "accomplishments," experiences, and memories for those of parents any day, we also discover. Well, duh! And many parents feel the same. They wouldn't go back in time and eliminate children from their lives in order to stay childfree forever. This is healthy. This is how we make sense of our lives and find joy in what we do, instead of wallowing in regret and doubt 24 hours a day.

Erbé compares her experiences showing horses with those of parents who bring kids to show their ponies. It's a nice example of different modes of living. Again unfortunately, because I for one would love to see the cliché of self-centered childfrees laid to rest, she comes off as smug, uninterested in other people, and a little shallow. But she does prove that she is happy, which I think was her point.

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Can I just say: come ON, childfree writers, step up to the plate! The parent-writers are kicking your *ass* on this one. At least on the blogs and papers I'm finding. This is exactly the sort of discussion that could lead to greater understanding of the childless/childfree minority by the childed/parenting majority. But being defensive, flippant, and shallow is not gonna engage 'em in the discussion. Urgh.

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Albert Mohler, a Christian blogger on Crosswalk.com, sees in the New York mag article that "Many parents do see their children as described by Senior — as "subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed." Parental authority is replaced by constant power struggles, lest the children be psychologically warped by a parent who stands in authority. Discipline is replaced by never-ending negotiation. The peace of the home is replaced by constant activity and frenetic energy. The earliest years of a child's life are increasingly filled with organized activity and institutional settings.

No wonder parents are less happy now." Lack of discipline, having kids late in life, and the transition of parenting from a normal life expectation to a lifestyle choice, contribute to the difficulties and unhappiness of modern parenting. Of course there's a solution: Christ! 

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Core Knowledge blogger Robert Pondiscio  writes of Senior's article: "For those unaccustomed to New York-style navel gazing, the piece can read dangerously close to Onion-style parody—“Parents surprised to learn parenting isn’t fun”—but if you can get past the whiny anecdotes from Manhattan habitués there are interesting ideas to chew on." He takes care to note Senior's discussion of how our currently popular mode of overbearing, overachieving parenthood might be sucking the happiness out of it.

MEANING & BIGTIME SATISFACTION VS. MOMENT-TO-MOMENT "HAPPINESS"

Does Parenting Suck?

Does parenting suck? Surveys and scientific data have sure supported that notion, indicating especially that for Americans, parenting is making people more and more "unhappy" over the years—especially people with money. Now some data show that parenting is rewarding on the long-  haul and in a different way than momentary pleasure.

_{- - -Note to childless/childfree readers: you might want to avoid the last section, about my own experiences step-parenting and approaching biological parenting. The whole piece does discuss parenting/childing issues in general and ain't necessarily safe for those wrestling with the grief of childlessness.} - - -

Can we get a big "duh" on that? Do you feel "happy" and "unstressed" and like life is a big bowl of cotton candy when you're climbing Mount Everest, frozen and oxygen-starved and convinced you're losing your mind and about to die? Probably not. Does that trip up Everest become a major, beautiful, amazing defining moment of your life? I should freakin' hope so!

Are Tough Challenges Rewarding in a Special Way?
Same with other gripping, deep, frustrating, yet rewarding aspects of life. For each hour of bliss, "fun," or "happiness" I experience writing, making art, and trying to facilitate ways for other people to do or distribute their writing or art (ya know, community events, putting out a magazine without getting paid, etc etc)—I probably spend two hours in drudgery mode, thirty minutes in grumpy mode, and fifteen minutes in hell. Some people say they can't staaaand writing, it drives them crazy, they're such a martyr, but they HAVE to do it. I've always thought that was silly, but if I break down my own time, I gotta admit it's not like I'm swimming in creative ecstasy all the time. 

It might be that difficult activities generate a sense of meaning, importance, and some ineffable feeling a bit more transcendent than moment-to-moment "happiness," not despite their difficult-ness, but because of it. I hate to admit this (because my parents were always on about it when I was a kid and I thought it was soooo dumb), but earning something, going through a challenge, brings a sense of reward, contentment, pride, and amazement that I don't usually find in something that just plops itself neatly into my lap.

Does Writing Suck?
A recent example from my professional life: winning a grant vs. getting a sweet writing gig. Most writers I know, especially younger/newer ones, would dance a zillion jigs to get a nice, regular, well-paying gig like my new one for the Science Fiction channel. The drudgery and undeniably dull bureaucratic hassle of a grant proposal would pale in comparison; having it be successful would be fairly unglamorous, too. I experienced the reverse. I'm very pleased to write the SyFy.com "Eureka Idea Lab" blog, but I've got lots of experience writing similar things. Landing a gig like that feels great in the moment-to-moment; the hard, impossible work of becoming a professional writer is mostly far behind me. Landing a gig is a familiar and pleasant sensation. Trying to get the gig didn't suck my soul dry and make me throw my calculator across the room in a fit of frustration—unlike attempting to write the grant.

I've been trying to sort out the whole grant-getting game for years now. It's aggravating and difficult in most moment-to-moment work. I feel like a loser and a failure, in addition to being an idiot for not giving up this wretched game. But my cool blog writing gig doesn't make me feel like I scaled Mount Everest. Winning a $12,000 RACC grant I wrote for Plazm magazine? That felt like reaching the peak! Writing the grant sucked big donkey balls. Having written the grant, especially as it succeeded, feels fantabulous. It's not just about the money, it's about knowing I worked my ass off to learn something that, for whatever reasons, was really hard for me to figure out.

Everyone's lives are full of such examples, from the small ("Ha! I fixed that broken alarm clock all by myself!") to the huge ("I got through twelve years of Alzheimer's disease as my mother's caretaker, and I'm a better person for it"). Moment-to-moment irritation and drudgery may not produce instantaneous "happiness," but they can culminate in major life satisfaction and deepen our sense of wonder, humility, and amazement in the face of human strife, the vastness of the universe, little things like that. To me, it's no surprise that parenting operates the same way, but perhaps on a longer scale. Instead of gaining satisfaction after working at something challenging for a short time, like getting a difficult Masters degree in two years, you're putting in decades of challenging drudgery peppered with moments of intense satisfaction and awe. 

Joy, Fun, Hate, Parenting, and Scientists
"All Joy and No Fun: Why parents hate parenting" by Jennifer Senior in New York magazine (thanks, Jane, for sending it my way) covers some of these studies in parenting satisfaction. I highly recommend the article. It looks a bit at how much parenting has changed in American culture, and how that affects our ability to enjoy it on a moment-by-moment basis. Comparisons are made to French and Danish parents, whose daily life happiness is higher than Americans', possibly because there is more direct social support for childrearing in those countries. However, Senior doesn't tackle the challenge of what parents here can do now to make the day-to-day more tolerable. Given that no one's going to give us a paid year's parental leave or free childcare, how can we truly enjoy the  individual moments with our kids? A little Buddhist mindtraining, perhaps?

(The article also kicked off a fine froth of online commenting about childless and childfree living versus parenting, the usual venomous and/or self-righteous arguments, with a particularly New York flavor. Dotted among The Usual Huffiness you'll find evidence that people are actually thinking about the conversation, reading the article carefully, and being open-minded.)

Step-parenting, Bio-parenting: What'm I Getting Into?

Coming to biological parenthood for the first time, under two months 'til I deliver if all goes well, I understand that I'm getting into something challenging that will dull my wits and rattle my core. I know that having a baby will threaten my marriage and wreak havoc on my other relationships. I worry about my mental and physical health. There will be little time for the things that I have considered "fun" during most of my life: sitting alone, writing, going to Burning Man, eating a decadent meal out on the town, going on artist's residencies, and the like. I fully expect to become a zombie mom who can barely utter three words that aren't about baby's bowel movements, sleep, or nursing.

And the rewards? I'll just have to see what they feel like. Being a stepparent has been extraordinary, and heavily influenced how I approached the biological clock when it hit. Aspects of my childfree life that seemed perfect in the past paled in comparison to the moments of joy, and the larger sensation of exhilaration, that I felt as a stepmom. It rarely felt like I was "giving up" frequent late nights out on the town in order to romp in the park with A., have family dinner right at 6 pm, go to a 9 a.m. soccer game (me??? at a kid's soccer game?? wtf?) or even to stay up through harrowing nights of temper tantrums or illness.

The question of whether it was "worth it" wasn't even a question for me. It wasn't just "worth" the frequent hecticness, semi-frequent pain, and occasional tedium; step-parenting and my relationship with A. made my life just plain better. Richer. Weirder. Funner. Unpredictable in new ways. Chock full of love and intensity. Guess it must've happened at the right time in my life, with the right cast of characters, including a frickin' fantastic guy and his unbelievably cool, wild daughter.

It's this experience that I look at when I read the New York magazine article or consider how having a baby may affect my life. Every kid is different. Every birth is different. I have no way of knowing what's coming up.

Being a stepmother has its advantages; not only did I skip the whole diaper-poopy-screaming-toddler phase, because I met A. when she was 4 and 1/2, but other parents were around to do much of the heavy lifting. Now I'll be the poopy-screaming-diaper-toddler-exhausted-freaking-out mom, and I won't be able to call this kid's "real mom" for the occasional tête-à-tête about discipline, school, or what the child should be allowed to post on Facebook. *I* will be the "real," biological mom. Eek.

But if raising a biochild brings even half the love, satisfaction, beauty, and astonishment I've experienced co-parenting A., I will have to consider the experiment a huge success... even if I don't feel "happy" and "light" and "fun" every day, moment by poopy-diapered moment.

Images from "Please Rescue Me," a performance I did at the Haybarn Theatre, Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont, in 2006. I think Em Delaney shot the pics.

COULD IT BE THAT THE CONVERSATION IS FINALLY GETTING MORE REASONABLE? CHILDFREE VS. BREEDERS IN A NEW LIGHT.

Obligatory warning: This post mentions pregnancy but doesn't otherwise get deep into infant/preggo talk. Should be safe for most CF/CL readers, I think...

The tenor of conversation online about childless, childfree, and parental issues seemed shrill, unreasonable, and unlikely to solve any problems in the long run, when I started this blog a few years back. I was vocally childfree for many years, got interviewed about it, got published about it, etc., but hopefully not in any hateful way. Still, it was an important component of my identity.

Some 10-15 years ago I joined an online CF group, a small one populated by some folks I knew in real life and other people too. Some stuff I found humorous; I didn't mind the word "breeder" (which my "fruit" friends had long called us "hets"); it was nice to share experiences with like-minded people.

However, the viciousness and bitterness of other posts seemed way out of whack. Well-off white people with graduate-level educations and good futures in the tech industry snarling about how put-upon they were by those nasty, evil breeding types—it seemed bizarrely cruel, classist, elitist, and frankly sometimes sexist. The conversations tended to be about how fuckin' cool we were for not being like the pond-scum normals who procreate. Many of whom were not just unenlightened and prone to talk about dull subjects like children, but poor and uneducated. La ti tah.

 So, though I really wanted to hang with fellow CF/CL people, I left the group.

When I wanted to rediscover resources for CF/CL folks online, years later, I found many a place that was even worse. Especially as I began, to my utter dismay, to experience the biological clock and question my previously rock-solid decision not to breed, I really sought good conversation about these things. From comments posted to newspaper sites when they ran articles about childfree living, infertility, any related issue... to blogs... to closed-loop discussion websites... I mostly found black-and-white thinking, bitterness, defensiveness, offensiveness, ad hominim attacks, and a lack of sympathy or interest in how other people lived. Everyone was a victim, it seemed—a whiny, angry one whipped to foaming peaks by the injustice of it all.

In other words, I found the Internet, in all its anonymous, cowardly glory.

This gave Nymphe an instant niche. I am still astounded by the feedback and support I've gotten for this one tiny, unpublicized blog. Just because I wrote about my experiences without assuming that parents are assholes and children are yucky. Just because I said, hey, there's a grey area of childless people, and we shouldn't have to fake that we're Totally! Happily! Childfree! all the time in order to fit the mold of the childfree cheerleaders. I still get the emails, some from people who've read current episodes of the blog and know I've crossed over... some from people who think I'm forever childfree.

I think the feedback has just been a sigh of relief from readers: thanks for writing this, because we're sick of the divisiveness. We're sick of the nastiness. Maybe we are victims in some ways, but we know things are more complex than many of the defensive CF groups want them to be, more complex than the defensive über-parents want to pretend.

Some people think it's weird or even unacceptable that a pregnant lady like me still reads and posts about childfree/childless/etc issues. But I do, because even if I were to squirt out two dozen screaming brats to drive all the other shoppers insane at the supermarket and overpopulate the planet and suck up all the tax money for schools, I would still care about inequality in our society. And the childless and childfree people in our society are treated unequally. That's just truth, supported by many facts. (See The Childess Revolution by Madelyn Cain for stats; it was written by a parent btw.)

In the last year I've noticed an uptick in reasonable, useful, interesting conversations about these issues online. Parenting blogs have them (see CafeMom post below). Childfree blogs have 'em too. (See this conversation at thebritgirl.com—the comments are probably more revealing than the initial post; you can see people mulling over each other's ideas.) Generalist newspaper articles tend to inspire pathetic posts lacking in thought, but strewn among them are really good discussions.

What I'd like to think is this: maybe we're actually listening to each other. Maybe we can guide the conversation to a point where it becomes useful. And then? There's hope for meaningful social change.

CHILDFREE & MIND CHANGERS ON OFFBEATMAMA

This post mentions pregnancy and such; it ain't fully childless-safe. Also, comments to the linked articles have a lot of moms and parents posting.

Well, I'm sorta sad that I didn't take Offbeat Mama up on it when they asked me to write a piece about childfree-childless-communication-changeovers, etc. Now that I'm pregnant, I'm too busy doing God's procreative work to dabble in such time-sucking hobbies as blogging.*

They did ask a still-childfree person, rainy, to write a piece, and it's good. The comments thread is great, too; it's so refreshing to find thoughtful people online genuinely discussing issues instead of wallowing in their own cleverness and defensiveness. Read it at offbeatbama.

From a different POV, there's an intriguing piece by a woman who preferred not to talk much to friends or in public when she and her partner started considering perhaps having a child. When she did finally come out about it, already pregnant, people's reactions were pretty darned weird—and very revealing about how society views childless and childfree people, the assumptions that are made. Check it here.

*The personality transplant from the old-me to mom-person hasn't completely worked yet. Apparently I'm still tongue in cheek sometimes, perhaps even sarcastic. The real reason i couldn't write it is that I'm on a very time consuming professional blogging/writing gig for NBC/Universal, and just got a grant to help produce the next issue of the magazine i co-edit. So... not so many unpaid blog posts these days.

NEW DATA ON CHILDLESSNESS COMPARES 1994 TO 2008. MOST PEOPLE: FEWER BABIES! GRAD SCHOOL CHICKS: MORE BABIES!

Pew Research Center released a new report on who's having babies and who isn't.

"Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s," they say. "While childlessness has risen for all racial and ethnic groups, and most education levels, it has fallen over the past decade for women with advanced degrees." Childlessness is defined solely by womb activity, as opposed to the day-to-day parenting.

There aren't too many surprises here. I was intrigued, though, by a few factoids. Perhaps we're trending away from the cliché of childless/childfree folks being white and highly educated. (Pew didn't measure the number of cocktail parties, height of stiletto heels, or number of cats per childless woman, however.) And there's solid evidence that the mom demographic isn't entirely composed of married ladies with no life outside their domestic duties. A majority of those advanced degree-holders were biological mothers.

RACE
Non-white categories saw sharper *relative* increases in childlessness than whites did. In the last fourteen years, the childlessness rates for black and Hispanic women grew by more than 30%, whereas the rate for white women increased just 11%. Still, white chicks are a bit more likely to be childless. In 2008, 20% of white women, 17% of black and Hispanic women, and 16% of Asian women were childless.

Americans being obsessed by race, there are loads of detailed stats about this on the survey. Take a look; it's interesting stuff.

EDUCATION
Proving once again that I'm a dutiful member of the herd, it appears that women with advanced college degrees (masters, PhD, etc) are more likely to have biokids now than they were ten or twenty years ago.†  What's that all about, I wonder? The report offers explanations for the general decrease in bio-childbearing among the population at large, but doesn't attempt to explain why we overeducated ladies started poppin' out babies again.

In all other groups, like "no high school diploma" and "bachelor's degree," women are either staying childless in the same numbers as they were in the early nineties or those numbers are increasing. "Since the 1990s, rates of childlessness have risen most sharply for the least educated women. The most dramatic change has occurred among women with less than a high school diploma, whose likelihood of bearing no children rose 66% from 1994 to 2008."

MARRIAGE
Surveys divide people up into "never-marrieds" and "ever-marrieds," not giving us detailed data about how long someone was married, whether the law doesn't allow them to marry their partner, or whether they divorced at age 18 after being married by an Elvis impersonator and living with their coke dealer husband for 45 days. In other words, the married/unmarried stats are as binary, old-fashioned, and unreliable as the childless/gave-birth stats.

Way, way more never-married women are childless than women-who-have-ever-been-married, but these days, far more never-marrieds are likely to give birth than they were a couple decades back. Let me take you back to 1994, when the World Wide Web was a wacky new phenomenon and hardly anyone in this country had cell phones or tattoos. Back then, 71% of unmarried women were childless. Whereas in 2008—when getting rid of your cell phone was harder to do than removing a tattoo, and you did your banking and half your social life online—only 56% of unmarried women remained childless. That's a dramatic drop.

NONBIOLOGICAL PARENTING, CO-PARENTING
The Pew report actually bothers to mention women who parent or co-parent without going through the full biological hoopla, though data comes from elsewhere and is mentioned only briefly. "Some women who do not bear their own children raise children as adoptive mothers or stepmothers. According to the 2008 American Community Survey, there are 61.6 million biological children in U.S. households, as well as 1.6 million adopted children and 2.5 million stepchildren."

Unfortunately, this data doesn't map directly to the Pew report's data. Knowing that there are 1.6 million adopted children in the United States doesn't tell us how many of their moms are considered "childless" by the Pew report!

SUGGESTIONS FOR THE NEXT SURVEY OR CENSUS,
since of course they are all reading random blogs to decide what information they should gather. Har har har. Anyway:

1) Stop defining "women who have never borne children from their uteri" as "childless." A full-time adoptive mother is in no way "childless." Ignoring her in the survey makes the data seem really inconclusive to me, in terms of tracking social trends. If you *do* take adoption and stepmothering into consideration, *then* what is the childlessness rate? That would be a much more useful statistic than "whose womb did what over the last ten years."

2) Track information for the grey areas of childlessness. How many PhD-toting women consider themselves "co-parents" but not "mothers"? I am a half-time stepmom, yet have characterized myself as "biologically childless." Where do I fit in? And a woman who happens to have given birth but isn't an active parent (gives the child up for adoption, doesn't have custody and rarely sees the child, etc.)—how should she be counted?

Basically, the binary definition of "childless" vs "parent" is inadequate and far too limiting. Childless, childfree, mother, biological parent, adoptive mother, birther or breeder who doesn't actually parent any children: give 'em all their own line on the census form!

3) Get over this quaint idea that women ages 40-44 provide a good measurement for studying childlessness and childbearing. Suppose Pew had interviewed me last year. Survey says? "Forty years old and childless." By the time those stats were compiled and published, they'd be inaccurate; today I'd say "Forty-one and pregnant." If all goes well, next year I'd say "Forty-two and a biological parent." I just skewed their results.

"This report uses the standard measure of childlessness at the end of childbearing years, which is the share of women ages 40-44 who have not borne any children," the report notes. One wonders who establishes these standards, given that more and more people are waiting later and later to have children, thanks to career options and to increasing availability of reproductive medicine and infertility treatment. To me, it would seem more sensible to survey women at age 50.

WTF
Maybe someone who understands statistics could riddle me this:

"Women who have borne children are more likely to be high school graduates (30%) than childless women (26%). Women with at least one child also are more likely than childless women not to have completed high school (11% vs. 8%)."  So if you have a biokid, you are both more and less likely to be a high school graduate. ??

FOOTNOTEY THINGS:

† "...rates have declined among women with advanced degrees -- by 17% for those with master's degrees and 32% for those with doctorates or professional degrees. Women with advanced degrees were more likely in 1994 to be childless than were women with bachelor's degrees -- 34% of women with doctorates or professional degrees were childless, as were 30% of those with master's degrees and 23% of those with bachelor's degrees."

Bibliography/bibliographical info: http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/758/rising-share-women-have-no-children-childlessness. Livingston, Gretchen and Cohn, D'Vera, "Childlessness Up Among All Women; Down Among Women with Advanced Degrees." Pew Research Center, June 25, 2010.

THIS BLOG STAYS. I CHANGE.

[THIS POST IS NNSFCL: NOT NECESSARILY SAFE FOR THE CHILDLESS]

a note from the followup to my post that wondered, "What should happen to this blog now that I am not going to be biologically childless?" in short, i'm going to keep this blog alive for now; label posts with warnings if i think they might be upsetting to those childless people who are triggered by certain topics; and just see what happens.

becoming pregnant doesn't mean you stop caring about what happens with childfree/childless issues, and the people suffering because of them.

What IF we redefine Woman?

Watch this IF you've experienced Notbaby grief, whether due to infertility or other reasons. Watch this IF someone you know might be going through it. Watch this IF you think grieving childless people are whiners who oughtta buck up and get over it. Watch this IF you generally don't care either way.

Because this reality is going on around you all the time, every day, IF you like it or not. Many of the people experiencing it aren't comfortable talking about it. Let's help them get it out of the closet.

What IF? A Portrait of Infertility from Keiko Zoll on Vimeo.

(And try not to be overly annoyed by the over-the-top heartstring-plucking music; by the end I was cryin' like the middle aged, hyperhormonal lady I am.)

Thanks to Cafemama.com for turning me onto this video, and to Ariel for coming out of the infertility closet. [Warning: this links out to an infertility story that did end with a baby.]

NAVIGATING CHANGE: R.E.'s Christmas miscarriage and decision to remain biologically childfree

"Although procreating was always the agreement between us, it isn’t what is best for our marriage.  People, goals, ideals – they all change.  I’m finding that the only way to sustain a healthy marriage is if you’re able to navigate that change together."

Reader R. E. shared her story for the Nymphe blog (and won a copy of Two Is Enough by Laura S. Scott). Read about R.E.'s re-dedication to her relationship and how she's working through change...

I'M STILL GOING TO EASTER ISLAND. I LEAVE AT 5 A.M.

(warning to childless people who've sought out this blog: the following post contains "ments" of sorts, discussing my crossover to biological parenthood.)

I'm heading to Easter Island tomorrow. Rapa Nui. Isla de la Pascua. Or, as the Polynesians there call it, Te Pito o Te Henua, "the navel of the world." I will be doing a performative ritual on my 41st birthday, as part of the Easter Island Project.

The biological clock and deep grief over biological childlessness inspired me to start the Easter Island Project in early 2007. As recounted on this blog and on the radio and such, for me the experience was traumatic, horrifically painful, and yet incredibly educational. That which does not kill us makes us stronger, right?

It brought up many philosophical questions for me, especially ones about why we create, why we exist, and how we make meaning in our lives.

PREGNANT LADY WANTS EQUAL TREATMENT FOR NON-PARENTS. FILM AT ELEVEN!

the following is extracted from email i sent to a friend today. we'd had a disagreement about child care and parental / maternity leave policies in the workplace, and she sent me a long, thoughtful email stating her position. she believes that all of us should help take care of all our children and our elderly; that there should be a safety net. i agree. she also sees parental leave as a normal life necessity, whereas leave time for other purposes she characterizes as "Me time" or "vacation." and that's where i disagree; also, she didn't like my suggestion that it's unfair to offer preferential treatment to parents and families without offering something similar (such as non-family leave time) to nonparents, and found it whiny to complain about things being "unfair" when "that's just how things are."

so. here goes:

i believe in a social safety net. i believe in education, in creating an environment that enables children to grow and adults to take care of each other --- whether or not we're taking care of people we happen to be blood related to. i also believe that fairness is an OK thing to strive for. the desire to open our minds / consider that other people's situations might deserve a different approach / even consider that our *own* sorrows and unfair treatments might be worthy of better approaches than we've gotten in the past / help people in the future even if there is no totally workable solution today / work toward equality / allow for possibilities that seem alien to us... this desire is what ends up, eventually, bringing about justice and "fairness" for people who are gay, black, Latino, disabled, transgendered, or female.

"that's not fair" vs. "that's just the way things are" is relative...

NO CHILDLESS FEMALE ASTRONAUTS...

...at least not in China. The Chinese space program plans to send its first women to space, but these women must already be mothers before they're eligible to take flight.

"The insistence that they should also be wives and mothers does not relate to their multi-tasking abilities. Officials are concerned that space flight might affect their fertility.

"It's out of the consideration of being responsible for the female pilots," Xu told the state news agency Xinhua. "Though there is little evidence on how the space experience will affect the female constitution, we have to be extra cautious. After all, it's unprecedented in China."

No word yet on why women's fertility is deemed more important than that of men, especially in a country with limited reproductive rights—nor what of women who'd like to be spacefarers but prefer to remain childfree. Read all about it in the Guardian UK.

VOTE: what should happen to this blog now that things have changed?

"I think you’re great.  Don’t stop blogging.  Please."

A reader named Renée just sent me that, and dang, was it nice to read. "In my search to find some sort of familiar voice online… I found nothing close," she said. And some other readers said similar: that I'd hit a weird niche that they couldn't find elsewhere, online or off.

I feel gratified that my torturous, whiny grieving-and-deciding process was useful to anybody. Really freakin' gratified. Now I just wonder what to do next. So you tell me: A, B, or C?

A) TOMBSTONE SITE
Should I stop posting to Nymphe and leave it here as a "tombstone" website? The point of that: some of these posts are linked from a lot of places, and people seeking information and balm for their wounds, they find 'em, they email me, they comment. So if the site stayed up, those posts would still be visible. And if that particular grieving person nosed around on the site, they would not be confronted by a bunch of new posts featuring Me the Pregnant Lady or Me the One with a Kid... which could be traumatic.

B) I-CHANGED-MY-MIND SITE
Leave Nymphe here. Leave the old posts. Leave the resources. But just keep telling my story as it unfolds. The new posts might sometimes refer to the eternal battle between defensive moms, defensive childless, and defensive childfrees, but they might also be about how I make the transition from my "No I won't give in to the biological clock" stance to the "Oh please I give up, can I have a baby now?" part of my life.

C) NUKE!
End the site, close it down, move on with my life. Main advantage to this is that I pay for my hosting on this site.

Any suggestions? Comment here, comment on Facebook, or email me at magdalen23 at le Gmail.

GIVEAWAY: "TWO IS ENOUGH" BY LAURA S. SCOTT

I just discovered that I'd pre-ordered a copy of the book "Two is Enough: A Couple's Guide to Living Childless by Choice" last fall, before receiving a review copy. That means a brand-spankin'-new copy goes to one of you! Email me one paragraph about the role of intentionally childless people in the culture or subculture you occupy,and you might be a winner. Woo! Send to magdalen23 at gmail.

"Two is Enough" (Seal Press, 2009) features interviews with intentionally childless/childfree couples, including one couple who changed their minds along the way. Most examples tend to shore up the choice to remain childfree, and author Laura S. Scott seems particularly interested in "early articulators" who decided while young that they didn't want to have children, and stuck to that decision later in life.

If you are or have been childless by choice, you'll recognize the social problems faced by these couples, the incredible cluelessness—both benign and aggressive—that the majority of people, those who do or will later reproduce, heap upon the minority, those who don't ever reproduce. Interviewees voice their frustrations and the solutions they've come up with. For example, when Scott asked Jason and Tamara if there were any downsides to their decision not to breed, "the only one they could think of was having to deal with other people's perceptions of them."

Another interviewee, Mario, takes on the bizarre, antiquated belief by the parenting majority that childfree folks are somehow selfish. "The most unfair, I think," he says, "is [the accusation] that we are selfish. Furthermore, in Mexican culture, motherhood is almost a veneration and fatherhood is a must to be considered an adult, so people will not easily accept the childfree status as truth. Instead they will assume there is a fertility problem, or that you are a freaky child hater."

It's a good read, but "Two is Enough" does have its tragic flaw: too much focus on the Childless by Choice Project survey conducted online by the author. The survey consists of 171 self-identifying respondents, many recruited through the organization No Kidding! I took the survey myself, and accidentally ended up taking it twice (Scott had posted a link to it on multiple blogs, and only later did I realize I'd done the exact same survey twice). The questions tended to be leading, and I felt that there wasn't much room in them for my feelings of ambiguity and confusion.

If Scott simply listed the results of the survey and left it at that, it would've been a nice accompaniment to the rest of her book. As it is, she refers to it frequently throughout the text, as though the survey provided hardcore scientific evidence supporting various claims about what childless and childfree people think and feel. With such a small pool of respondents, I believe the survey might not hold up to much scrutiny, and less weight should have been placed on it.

Like most books I've read about this subject, "Two is Enough" is biased and subjective. Scott's point of view is clearly pro-childfree but contains no anti-child or anti-parent hate speech. By exploring how couples can be fulfilled families without a screaming baby on board, she's filled a particular niche in the growing body of childless/childfree literature. I'd recommend "Two is Enough" to childless couples who want more advice and shared stories about dealing with a pro-natalist, parent-oriented world; to childfree people who want to be reassured that they've made the right choice; and to open-minded friends and family members who don't understand why their loved ones aren't popping out grandchildren and nephews for them to play with.

I hope to hear from you and send out a free copy of this book soon.

THE CHILDLESS TRAVELER

"Having children, being part of the direct genetic chain of generations, is one way to be in the stream of life...But, being at the center of history, I realize, merely walking the streets of a great city like St. Petersburg or New York, is another way of being in the stream of life."

Read Christina Gombar's post about dealing with chronic illness and infertility—and her negative feelings about the fertility industry—on the Silent Sorority blog.

Beyond Logic, Beyond Regret: Why I Finally Changed My Mind

The biological clock, a beautiful experience being a stepmom, and being with The Luv of My Life conspired to bring me four-plus years of self-torture self-discovery. Logically, it did not make sense to change my life plans, to complete the leap from childfree to undecided to childed. I've got significant health problems. I worry, like most thinking humans, about passing along medical and psychological characteristics from my birth family to any children.

Most importantly, my household family are happy the way they are—the biological dad with his biological daughter living with us half-time, a great biological mom living nearby, and a loving stepmom to boot. Ironically, it was their love that cracked my little walnut of a heart open... and inspired me to actually consider having a baby, not something I'd ever expected to see on my "Things To Do Before Death" list (yeah, I've got one of those).

The intensity of "maternal desire" or "the generative urge" took me off guard and blew apart everything I thought I knew. Whatever this Thing was, it was much bigger and much stronger than me. It was connected to history, ancestry, biology, nature, the great cycle of life, blah blah blah, stuff I had no control over. I did everything I could to stand up to its power, to remain a free woman, to wield my own damned willpower in the face of what felt like insurmountable pressure. I wanted to be a happy stepparent who wasn't contributing to the world's overpopulation problem. I wanted to be "free," and I grew up during the advent of second wave feminism, aware that I, unlike most of my forbears, could choose to have a career, focus on art and writing and music, follow my dreams of education and travel, without getting bogged down by that whole mothering thing. That's what I thought I wanted.

Whatever ran this universe—biology, DNA, evolution, Mother Nature, Father Nature, god, goddess, the Fates, the universe itself—really didn't give a shit what I thought I wanted. It had another plan for me, the same plan that finds 75-80% of humans reproducing, the same plan that keeps termites pumping out tens of thousands of eggs every day.

If you've read the Nymphe blog before, you know that I was not happy. I couldn't kick the grief that accompanied my decision to not-even-try becoming a birth- or adoptive-mother of a baby. I couldn't kick the sensation of regret: that I might regret this my entire life. The sensation of love: a giant wave of overwhelming, cheeseball LUUV that made me want to connect with the world, with history, with family, and with my husband in a very particular way. A procreative way.

And I couldn't kick the sensation that I was very, very tired. Standing in the universe's way, fists raised, refusing to surrender to this deep internal need, sucked a little more life out of me every day. It takes  a fuck of a lot of hubris to pull against everything that feels natural and inevitable, but, ya know, I'm no stranger to absurd bouts with pride. I'd tilted at plenty of windmills in my time. What was one more?

Maternal desire turned out to be the gigantic wind turbine that blew me off my warhorse. If I 'won' this battle, what was it, exactly, that I was winning? The bitter reward of knowing I could say 'Fuck You' to the universe, even if it meant stabbing myself in the heart? The classic female reward of pleasing the people I loved, so that they wouldn't have to bear the responsibility or inconvenience of a new child in their midst? The chickenshit reward of not having to radically change my life? The equally chickenshit reward of avoiding risks (any parenting or mentoring of a child is a risky proposition; throw in my panoply of mental and physical disabilities, and the risks grow)? The intangible spiritual fulfillment of getting through something unbearable? That which does not kill me makes me stronger? The intellectual reward of surpassing typical gender programming? Keeping the freedom to la-ti-ta, do whatever the hell I want with my days and months?

These rewards were not enough.

I recently came to terms with what I really want. What I would like and love is to have a baby. But what I really want is to let go of the rock and float downstream. What I really want is to earn a sliver of acceptance and relinquishment; to surrender to that which is bigger than me, more ancient, beyond comprehension, beyond the everyday American business of free will and self-meta-programming.

I didn't want maternal desire to be the bane of my existence anymore; I wanted to accept it. I finally had to say, OK, I don't really have that much control over the deepest parts of myself. I am not the ruler of my limbic system and the reptilian depths of my brain and nervous system. Dealing with the biological clock was like dealing with my bipolar diagnosis in my twenties: it took me years to accept that some things were bigger than me, that much of my body and mind were controlled by chemicals floating around within me.

It took many years, near-ruination of my life, and several suicide attempts to come to terms with bipolar disorder, to accept that Wonderful Me was not in charge of all this. Wonderful Me needed to step aside, try the medications, and learn that maybe being run by a bunch of hormones and neurotransmitters, though it sounded dehumanizing, really wasn't such a bad thing. I just had to get used to the idea.

Now I'm learning to accept that whether it's cultural, personal, or merely hormonal, maternal desire is real, and it's got me by the ovaries. I wanted to step out of the universe's way. If it wanted to grant me a child? That would be fabulous. If not? At least I would no longer be leading a fierce charge against the entirety of nature and the gorgeous, painful yearning within my own body, soul, and mind. My husband agreed. He, too, is a person full of love.

Researchers have noticed age-related distinctions in how and why we experience regret. The young are more likely to regret things they did rather than things they didn’t do. After all, at that stage in life there’s still time to see Australia, climb K2, or write a novel. But as we age, this tendency reverses, and it’s what you didn’t do that stings. When you look back and see all the mountains left unclimbed, the sense of loss can be devastating. (from AARP via The Situationist)

I may look back and regret my choices. I may regret that I didn't insist on having children when I was younger, more fertile, less likely to have miscarriages and birth defects. I may regret that I didn't stay childfree and keep battling, keep fighting, keep seeking comfort and peace on my own weird terms and against all odds. I may regret that I wasn't satisfied with stasis, the status quo, remaining the footloose, fancy-free, childfree Tiffany I had always known. I kind of doubt it. That Tiffany was struck down long ago. I guess this is what they call growing up. I've never been very good at it. I'm a little slow that way.

I don't think I'll regret this decision, however it turns out.

To my childless and childfree sisters, brothers, and others, I send out love and thanks and gratitude and love again. It sometimes feels like a loss or even a betrayal when one of our kind, in the 15-20% minority, crosses over to the dark side, joins the mommy club. "You'll change your mind," people told me a zillion times when I was young and vocal about being childfree. I really fuckin' hate that they were right... but they were. I changed my mind.

I'm pregnant. Pregnant and aware how fortunate I am to be pregnant, when thousands of people must struggle with infertility every day, must tilt at the gods' windmills for other reasons than mine. Pregnant and aware that this isn't the politically and environmentally correct thing to do (as an anti-breeder man recently reminded me a few months back, before casually dropping into the conversation that he had a grown son!). I'm pregnant and aware that the parenting, childed majority carry a great deal of entitlement and privilege in our society, along with the stress, responsibility, and dedication that accompany good parenting. I'm pregnant and thankful.

I'm floating downstream.

PREGNANT WOMEN ARE SMUG. SO'S EVERYONE ELSE. WHAT TO DO?

There ain't many nice things about being waffly, making decisions you can't live with, weighing your options endlessly, and feeling unable to settle on one tidy identity. Mom? Nonmom? "TTC" Trying to Conceive wannabe-mom? Childfree? Childless? "CSM" Childless stepmom? Nullipara? "CBM" childless by marriage? Stepmother? Feminist? Writer? Artist? Career woman? Traditionalist? What the hell am I and what the hell do I want to be?

Now I've spent four years investigating the whole mess: parenting, maternal desire, the biological clock, grief, and the unfair plight of the childless and childfree in our culture. For that matter, the also-unfair and strange position of mothers in our society. Have I finally learned something? Well, maybe. Here's what I've got:

We cannot know each others' experience based on surface identities alone. We cannot say anything without possibly inspiring angst, boredom, love, empathy, or agony in some listener or other. Everything we say can and will be interpreted with nuance, and will be heard through a filter the speaker may not realize exists. One woman's monologue on how giving birth has made her capable of real love, a love that no one but a parent can understand, especially a mother...

MOURNING WITH MARGARET

 Do you not know how bleeding
 Leaves your mind and guts unheeding?
 Bleed; you are not like man, you
 With your ripe pear contracting, are you?
 Hm. As the end grows nearer
 You may come to hold it dearer;
 Rich within, your secret din
 Sits muffled by your heart of tin;
 And yet you will take it on the chin.
 Now no matter, lady, the course.
 A pear can ride a horse.
 For this autumn you sent; it came
 in gusts ghosting, no name:
 It is the blight woman is torn for;
 It is the seed you mourn for.

        ---moi, miss tiffany lee brown
    (written in 120 seconds, part of my Two-Minute Poem of the Day series)

"REMOVE CHILD BEFORE FOLDING"

Here's another article about overparenting and helicopter parents. What I wonder is this: has the rising trend in overparenting contributed to the hostile atmosphere between childless people and parents? Or can we blame that on the Internet, the increasing numbers of childless and childfree people in the U.S. and elsewhere, and the fact that this minority group of people is finally finding its voice?

Overparenting in Time magazine here.

CHILDFREE & CHILDLESS WOMEN BATTLE IT OUT WITH "THE MOMMIES"...

Homemaker-mothers stake out their territory after centuries of being treated like crap. Childfree and otherwise biologically childless women who will stay childfree are in the minority (20%) and seek out others like themselves. Working women have to defend their decision to work outside of the home*. Infertile women feel intense pain that is often mocked or misunderstood.

And then there are women like me, who've wandered along a few different points of the spectrum, in my case going from vociferously childfree to grieving (thanks to that biological clock) to being a stepmom, and yes, finding co-parenting intensely meaningful. Men and other-gendered folks who are wrestling with similar issues. We're barely even acknowledged as part of the conversation.

Now let's suppose we all start flinging mud at each other. Not just bemoaning or celebrating aspects of our own lives, but lashing out. The Internet boosts the battle. Online, we can all vomit out whatever words we want, any ol' time, and feel few real-life consequences, compared to standing in a group of real people and announcing our views. I've been doing this since 1992; I can be a total Internet asshole. But it's not necessarily helpful or useful.

The media promotes the mommy conflict because they're guaranteed to get a zillion comments whenever they run: a story about allegedly self-absorbed, wealthy infertile women; an opinion piece by an allegedly aloof childfree person; a clearly arrogant parent who thinks that parenting is the ne plus ultra of all existence. In the resulting blog comments and counter-blogging, everyone will accuse each other of selfishness.

I'm a sucker for a good fight, but this one has really gotten me down. When we're all disrespecting each other and playing Queen of the Hill: who wins? Some fat cat media executive? Ariana Huffington? A desperate blogger wishing to be understood, to have her views affirmed by similar people who must be out there? In the latter case, how long will that blogger's outburst make her feel better?

In that small moment of smugness or desperation, when we write that defensive, angry post: we want to reach out. We want to say, "HEY I'M HERE, MY EXPERIENCE MATTERS, AND I HAVE A VOICE." This is the genius of the online communications revolution, along with the zine revolution, pirate radio, independent music, and small press.

I get paid real folding money to write about my experiences and opinions for newspapers and magazines. That, and teaching, constitute the bulk of my day job. Here on Nymphe, I can blog. No one pays me, but I can blather without going through an editor or making everything nice and pretty. I can be me, and I can be completely real.

Millions of other lucky ladies--- those with jobs or disposable incomes or local libraries that allow us to get computers and Internet access---can do it, too. What we seem to be saying, underneath all the clawing and spitting, is simply, RESPECT ME. Respect me and my choices.

Try to understand the hand fate or god or biology or nature, or whatever's in charge of this mess, has dealt me. Respect the emotions I go through. Don't tell me that your way is the superior way, we bloggers and yellers seem to be saying. Don't judge me. I'll just get defensive and yell back.

How can we get on the same page and agree to put up with each other and each other's lives, including reproductive choices? I think we put too much pressure on ourselves. My mom was among those first women to use the birth control pill in the US, in the 1960s. C'mon, guys, we've had only one generation to get used to contemporary feminism, to start acclimating our new gender roles in the larger culture. Think of all the changes in that short span of time. There's no way all the issues can be ironed out in such a blip of history. We're totally freakin' confused by all the options... but hey, maybe that's OK.

Our entire culture has just begun dealing with this. A television show called Murphy Brown was considered revolutionary about 20 years ago, because in it a single career woman decided to have a baby. The vice president of the United States bothered to mention this fact. Dude: that was only two decades ago! Speaking of babies, we are all infants, newcomers to this radically altered, feminist way of life. There's no adequate social, cultural, political, or often familial infrastructure for handling what we're all going through.

Realistically, how can we get there? Is fighting enough? Is yelling enough? Is blogging enough?


- - -

Some stuff to read:

"Ack! What's going on? If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd be convinced we were in the midst of a well-coordinated, full-on assault against those who can't or don't have children."  From "Moms, We Hear You Loud & Clear," by Pamela Tsigdinos on the Coming2Terms blog. http://coming2terms.com/2009/11/16/something-in-the-water.aspx?results=1

From "Don't Forget to Have Kids, Part Two" by Mika Brzezinksi, at Huffington Post. (Childless/childfree people: take a deep breath before reading this one. Or maybe do like an hour of meditation or yoga. Get ready:) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mika-brzezinski/dont-forget-to-have-kids_b_358839.html

EXPLODING, FERTILE HEADS.

"On the other hand do not discount your Athena-like brainchildren that spring forth from your temples. They too can take a life of their own."

                        —my friend La M., to me, today

In many myths—and our dear friend Wikipedia can relate some of them to you—the "virgin" goddess Athena, goddess of wisdom, war, crafts, culty ritual goodness, and general kick-assiness, was born fully-formed from the head of Zeus. Whether she just popped out of there like a jack in the box or had to be hacked out of Zeus' skull by Prometheus or some other well-hung god is a matter of debate. Anyway. The image is clear: more than one way to birth something amazing.

She's also occasionally attributed with being an adoptive mom.

HEALING FROM THE GRIEF OF BEING CHILDLESS LEADS ONE WOMAN TO DEATH.

Desperately seeking healthy ways to grieve and move on? You're not alone. The question of motherhood or childlessness, for those of whom it happens to hit hard, can bring about deep grief and existential crisis. "What is the meaning of life?"

Well, we could ask Monty Python, or we could delve in deep and find it, ourselves. Especially if we're with reluctant/unwilling partners, this process can be even lonelier than usual. Or if, like some women (thank goddess not me), we're surrounded by an entire community that has children: what do you do if 100% of your friends are pregnant or have babies, if you live in a small town where family is the only topic of discussion, or if your church promotes procreation (you know my answer on that one, but i can't judge someone else for staying in what i consider a shitty religion; I've heard from more than one person that I'm stupid for staying in a marriage with someone who doesn't want to have kids with me. Takes all kinds.).

If you can get through this harrowing process without flinging yourself off a bridge or, like the characters in the film Raising Arizona, stealing someone's baby, you're already doing great. Hats off to you. But you may find a creeping need for deeper spirituality in your life. I recently did a creativity program that led me to write, in giant capital letters: I AM ANGRY AT GOD, even though, ya know, I don't even believe in God.

I started to see why people, especially around this age, finally throw in the towel on being rational and slide into some religion or other. It's because sometimes things are simply too much for us to bear. If we don't offload some of this on a hopefully benevolent, external spirit or being or god or Godness or universe, if we don't Let It Go (where does it go, exactly, the stuff we're instructed by New Agers to "let go"?)... well, we may not be able to make it through. Or we may become so bitter and twisted that we probably should've jumped off that bridge when the biological clock first smacked us down, because hey, who wants to live life bitter and twisted and sad and grieving and nasty? Not on a hipster-cynic level, but FOR REAL?

One childless stepmom (CSM, in online support parlance) whose partner didn't want more children sought help in a program that was supposed to transform life, mind, and spirit. It sure did. But she didn't live through that process.

Here's the story.

FEMININITY, WOMANHOOD, GENDER IDENTITY, & REPRODUCTION...

Commenters to the Nymphe blog, and other places where I've been involved in discussions about the choice of whether to reproduce, have asked whether I feel like less of a woman because I chose not to have biological children. (Some imply that if I do feel unwomanly for not being a biomom, it's merely a societal gender construct and therefore perhaps beneath me to feel...)

SOME BY CHANCE, SOME BY CHOICE

Nancy Rome wrote a thoughtful piece for the Washington Post that captures some of the breadth of the childless/childfree experience (at least for women). She spoke with 100% childfree by choice women, and those who had miscarriages or stillbirths and decided to continue life childfree. One woman said her decision—and other people's reactions to it—made her feel like an outlaw.

'But almost all the women I've talked with describe feeling acutely aware of what they see as our national obsession with motherhood,' she writes...

OBVIOUS CHILD

"Your pee smells like Cheetos" and "fucktard" are among the excellent lines in this short, Internet-viewable film. That alone should recommend "Obvious Child," but it gets extra points for representing what sex, love, pregnancy, and life are like for some young women.

Note: this post/that film is probably not suitable for people actively dealing with infertility and similar grief, so stop here. Also: SPOILER ALERT about the film follows.

Unlike "Juno" and "Knocked Up," Obvious Child doesn't gloss over...

I'LL BE ON NPR / OREGON PUBLIC BROADCASTING THIS WED. RE: CHILDLESS, CHILDFREE, AND ALL THAT GOOD STUFF.

New Oregon director Tiffany Lee Brown will be a guest on the Oregon Public Broadcasting show Think Out Loud on Wednesday, October 14, 2009. The show airs live 9:00-10:00 a.m. on National Public Radio stations throughout Oregon and Southwest Washington.

TOL welcomes your online comments and live calls to the show. So get on the horn and ask an intelligent, nice question or share your story! The online discussion is already underway. During the show, call 888-665-5TOL (or 665-5865), or email comments to thinkoutloud ((at)) opb.org .

ABORTION DURING THE BIOLOGICAL CLOCK

"It isn’t very often that you’re called upon to make a decision that you know will affect the rest of your life, a decision that is irrevocable and defining. I chose to end the pregnancy for what I thought were good reasons, chief among them being my boyfriend’s emphatic unwillingness to be a father." —Margaret Gunther in Modern Love

Personally, I've never been pregnant. I may not even be fertile for all I know; however, I'm paranoid about disease and unwanted pregnancy, so I haven't chanced it. But I did notice a change in my attitude during the time (mid thirties) when I finally, very reluctantly, started acknowledging that I might actually want to have a biological child—something I never imagined for myself...

THE REFERENDUM

Which lifestyle to choose? Kids to have or not have? Marriage to pursue or singlehood to live? Why so much snark, jealousy, and bitterness between "the referendums" of people who've chosen their various paths—especially when they hit middle age?

Tim Kreider's excellent, poignant essay on the subject, and some surprisingly intelligent, cogent comments*, make for great reading on the NY Times website. 

*"Surprising" given some of the idiotic, bizarre, hateful, and vitriolic comments I've seen on that site. Maybe Kreider is given a break because he's male? Or maybe it was the word "infertility" that sent NY Times blog posters into a foaming-at-the-mouth, disgusting comment-frenzy last year...

TO BREED OR NOT TO BREED... in Marie Claire

Laura Scott interviewed me & lots of other childless by choice people for her book Two is Enough. And some of her conclusions appear on the website of Marie Claire, archived from the October edition of the print magazine.

The article, entitled "To Breed or Not to Breed?" and written by Abigail Pesta, busts some typical cultural myths about childfree people (while perpetuating one myth that bugs the hell out of me). Here they are, and here are my own musings on 'em...

For some other myths, coming from the opposite direction, check out this interview with Christina Gombar.

I AM BIOLOGICALLY CHILDLESS.

TO SEE NEW POSTS ON THE NYMPHE BLOG, PLEASE KEEP ON SCROLLIN'... THIS VIDEO IS JUST AN INTRODUCTION. HELLO, EVERYONE.

WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY...

"Basically, nature wants you to have babies. Society wants you to pay to raise wage-earners, taxpayers, and cannon fodder for their wars. ...Saying no to that dictate of nature bestows quite a bit of power that you would have invested in off-spring that can be directed elsewhere. So if you decide not to have kids, pick another twenty year project and get busy." --Franis Engel on pandalous.com, one of many thoughtful commenters discussing The Baby Question

My Spidey Sense is tingling! I read this today after posting yesterday's ramblings about, among other things, my ongoing fight with/against/? my body and nature. I offhandedly speculated that by having will, discipline, and determination win out over natural and biological urges, I and my kind might be acquiring some sort of spiritual warrior status. Nuns and monks and yogis can surpass their "natural" urges, so why not us?

But I thought Engel's sentence above very interesting. "Saying no to that dictate of nature bestows quite a bit of power..." When in the thick of The Baby Issue, I don't feel powerful. I feel like I'm in a deathmatch, wrestling with an angel or a demon, feeling the fragmentation of my mind/will and my body/biology. That deathmatch is eating up much of my time and energy. And yet here is the idea that it might bestow on me, on us, a special kind of power, personally and in the world.

As anyone who's ever gone through serious grief or serious struggle knows, these are sources of personal transformation, greater empathy with others going through their own struggles, greater determination, the realization that one can get through many tough times, and suchlike. Engel suggests that we not only earn these lessons and the "power" that comes with them, but a level of different power than parents can have, simply because we have chosen a different path and therefore have more energy to expend on something besides our children.

having grief in one area of life doesn't snuff out all fulfillment in other areas of life.

A childfree by choice woman named May just posted some cool comments and questions on an older post, and got me off & running again about the childless/childfree/motherhood/fulfillment tangle. Read her post and my absurdly lengthly replies right here on yr local Nymphe blog.

a few highlights: maybe we become some kind of yogi-type spiritual warriors by denying our bodily desires to such an extent, like monks. who knows.

i don't imagine this (level of daily grief) will be a permanent feeling.  (it's already been changing and getting better...)

in terms of grief, it's very different to other griefs i've experienced and/or watched others go through.

i do live a fulfilling life, always have. but i am not fulfilling what my body, my dna, and my hormones believe to be my Biological Destiny. that's a huge struggle.

it's like talking to someone who believes in angels or that God wants them to wear a veil all the time or that aliens are controlling them despite the tin-foil-lined hat they're wearing: fascinating but utterly, well, alien to me. UNTIL i experienced it.

i was probably worst off around age 37-38. if that hadn't improved somewhat, and if i hadn't found ways to manage the grief and connect with others going through similar grief, well, i'm not sure i'd be here today.

imagine you're on a chain, in a river, like the Greeks' Tantalus. you're starving and you're thirsty. somehow, your body keeps going despite the fact that you never get food or water. every time you bend to drink, the chain stops you. there's a fragrant orange tree right overhead. you can't reach the orange, however many times you try. maybe someone upriver is BBQing a steak. for infertile people, the chain may seem irrevocable. but many of us fall somewhere along a wide spectrum of childlessness/childfree life. we DECIDE not to drink the water or eat the orange, for the sake of the child, our marriages, our health, the planet, or other reasons. can you imagine that? standing in a river, your body insisting that you are dying of thirst, and not drinking? well, that's what this feels like.

part of why i want to tell my story is that i think younger women should be aware that however solid they are in their childfree decision, they may get their asses completely kicked by the bioclock later on. (yes, i'm willing to get dogpiled, as i have on other forums, for daring to say this.)

on childless women not being womanly: is Lauren Hutton unwomanly: Oprah? Simone de Beauvoir, Frida Kahlo? Ella Fitzgerald? Julia Child? yeah, didn't think so.

nature is another matter altogether. there are some animals and plants out there who replicate without breeding, but not generally a cuddly bunch. going through this, i suddenly felt alienated from nature itself.

to comment -= please read the original thread right here on yr local Nymphe blog and add your comment there.