Hello again world!

I'm not as consistent as I would like to be, which is why keeping up with a blog is like running thru molasses on a hot day. I'm also constantly changing as a person, which makes me curious/scared about going thru the back posts for this blog. Can we just ignore what I said about past guys I liked, and indigo children set to rule the world this year? Because I'm pretty sure the latter isn't happening. I've now come back to talk about a subject that relates to me: child free mothers.

Jezebel has an article on it here that discusses a recent Time article on whether or not having "it all" means not having children.

According to Time, "A 2010 Pew Research report showed that childlessness has risen across all racial and ethnic groups, adding up to about 1 in 5 American women who end their childbearing years maternity-free, compared with 1 in 10 in the 1970s." Last semester I took a class on marriage and family that told the same story, that women are choosing to not have children in increasing numbers. Their reasons are many, some may be due to overpopulation concerns, wanting to focus on career instead of family, children aren't for them etc etc.

Like a lot of my opinions (and probably yours too) they are evolving ideas that do not force their way in, but instead sit and drink tea for awhile before making themselves known. I don't remember when I decided that children aren't for me. I've had a tumultuous childhood that I have known for years would be difficult to not impart on a precocious young mind. I have realized that a career is more important to me. I have taken a class that told me, not only would over $100,000 be spent on a child throughout its lifetime--but a marriage would be unhinged with the arrival of a child. My parents have four children, and I have watched my mother struggle to raise all of us, as well as my sister who has cerebral palsy and cannot take care of herself--enough to know that its hard work. I have watched enough children, changed enough diapers and been around them enough to realize that the benefits do not outweigh the costs. I do not see children as wonderful beings that will inspire my life, I see them as little human beings that will poop and cause me stress, and then grow up into teenagers that hate my existence. Not for me.

I have yet to be judged for not having children, instead that (if it happens) will probably show up once I'm married (if that happens) and my peers are already planning to wed our children together. There is an assumption in our culture, permeated by centuries of the patriarchy that women are here solely for being vessels to care for children. The first wave of feminism challenged the idea that women belonged in the home, and championed for the right for women to enter into the workforce. But the assumption that women want and need children is still present in our culture. Time says it best in its article,

"The decision to have a child or not is a private one, but it takes place, in America, in a culture that often equates womanhood with motherhood. Any national discussion about the struggle to reconcile womanhood with modernity tends to begin and end with one subject: parenting. . . The Weekly Standard's Jonathan V. Last has made the case in his controversial book What to Expect When No One's Expecting that the selfishness of the childless American endangers our economic future by reducing the number of consumers and taxpayers."

I was raised in a home in which it was expected for me to have children, but also expected to go to school and hold a career. Its for this reason, that the notion of "having it all," always seemed like no big deal to me. I figured I could simultaneously go to college, meet my husband, get married, have kids and begin my political or business career all at the same time. But the older I've gotten, the more I've realized that its a lot more difficult than that. Our culture has always had a difficult time accepting a variety of life choices, instead the heternormative view is seen as "normal," and rational. Anything outside of a straight marriage, children or wanting to excel in a career by rising thru the corporate ladder--seem odd and strange to a lot of people. Its disheartening, that someone would call the choice of not raising children as "selfish." To me, after reading Dan Brown's novel Inferno, which centers around global overpopulation--I'm more inclined to believe in the opposite, that not having children will lessen the amount of people who contribute to consumption of natural resources that hurt the earth. Yes, I'm selfish to want to save the planet instead of contributing to the wealth of the 1%.

I've set my mind on being a childless women, despite social pressures, the media and my parents need to be grandparents. Does anyone else feel similar? What are you're reasons to have/not have children?