NYMPHE: Childless, Childfree, Parent, Stepmom.

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.

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.

- - - - - -

*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...

 

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:

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

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?)

- - - - - - - - - - - -

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."

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

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!

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.)

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

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

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

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! 

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.