Did You Have a Childfree Defining Moment?
One incident, or a string of them, was usually the indicator we were going to forego children irrespective of the economy, politics, and romantic relationships.
For some childfree people, it’s just one of those things we knew in childhood.
Often spurred by bullying and poisonous school, home, and/or day camp environments that instilled a strong disdain of other kids even though they were still a kid.
For AFAB children in particular, a common theme I saw come up in r/Childfree and the old childfree LiveJournal was a patent disinterest in toys like baby dolls and video games that centered care elements, such as the rush of mid-2000s Nintendo DS games that basically reskinned Nintendogs but you care for a baby instead of a puppy.
For other childfree folk, it’s a specific moment in adulthood. Or a series of moments over time, then the last straw gets drawn.
This is an essay about what I dubbed “childfree defining moments”.
I want to be clear before we continue, I’m talking about the childfree by choice.
Not infertile people and couples who eventually gave up trying to have biological children. Or people who’d otherwise want children if it wasn’t for glaring structural problems that have only worsened since the same people who got elected when I was in kindergarten are STILL in office and doing total fuck all about things in bad need of fixing like climate change, economic inequality, healthcare, and childcare. All of these things need to be addressed regardless of family status, but I digress.
No, Childfree Defining Moments were experienced by those of us who made a conscious choice not to have kids regardless of political and environmental reality.
That even if we spring-boarded to this socialist utopia if the 2000 election wasn’t stolen and we got Al Gore’s climate policy, completely reverting the horrors in front of you right now like the repeal of Roe v. Wade and frequent deadly superstorms, we still wouldn’t want kids.
The pandemic laid bare that American society would collapse without women’s unpaid labor and millions of others providing underpaid care and service work. We live in a society that wants to force you to have kids, but does not give one iota of a fuck if they’re gunned down at school or have a drastically shorter and more painful life thanks to a lack of mask mandates and frequent COVID re-infection.
Watching this unfold on social media and in real life, observing what was happening with family and friends, was absolutely that last straw moment for many people — but especially Millennial women — who were already veering towards opting out of starting a family be it for personal or structural reasons.
But some of us had that sole defining moment or last straw long before our lives were changed by the pandemic.
For me personally, it was definitely a series of moments from my late teens to the cusp of 21/22, followed by years of observations and experiences that reinforced my choice.
There’s rhetoric hurled at childfree people that just gets repeated so often, it’s an in-joke in online childfree communities that you got “bingo’d” based on variations of a bingo card.
And the first one I remember hearing was when I was 13, when my 20-year-old sister had just started dating her boyfriend and *already* my mother wasn’t even hinting, just bluntly saying out loud that she better get grandkids.
Why, so she could abuse and fuck them up like she did with us?
I didn’t agree with my sister on a lot of things. Hell, I never knew when she’d have my back or sell me out to those tactless abusive assholes with her “I have to be good” shtick.
But when she shrugged and deadpanned, “Have them yourself” in response to our mother, I cheered for her like I was at a Knicks game. Our mother was affronted, to say the least.
Then it was my turn at 14 when my mother said that if you didn’t have kids, you were selfish.
(Hey, notice how the spaces on that bingo card are already filling up?!)
I replied, “Having kids would fuck up my life, like going to Millersville to study English that you seem to want me to do.”
My mother was an extremely unhappy abuser who had Peggy Hill degrees of overestimating her wit and wisdom. She always had to have the last word no matter how wrong or obstinate she was, which wasn’t helped any by living in a society that always assumes parents are right and kids are wrong since we’re just their stupid human pets who better perform the right way for them.
But she was left speechless at that retort and I was proud.
Then a year later, she died.
A few months after her death, my sister broke up with her boyfriend then never dated again.
Initially, I thought her never dating again from such a young age was an overreaction to that douchebag’s anemic displays of affection, ditto for the trauma of him basically admitting he was settling for her til a better woman came along. But people didn’t have nuanced discussions about the asexuality and aromantic proclivity side of the queerness spectrum at the time, so she pretty much came out as both but we didn’t know the words for that yet.
I veered in the opposite direction as a proudly red-blooded subcultural girl who had an open bed but wouldn’t have an open heart for a while yet. Although the desire for a real relationship was latently present.
My mother’s declaration that my sister and I were being selfish wasn’t my absolute Childfree Defining Moment, but it was the first domino that fell which I can palpably remember.
It was also an era where alternative girls were constantly told to change and “look like women, not meat cleavers”. This inadvertently led to the silent collapse of more dominoes.
As many alternative aesthetics have been co-opted by the mainstream, you don’t hear this as much as you used to. But I remember how it was condescendingly droned in my ear nonstop that this was just a phase, I wouldn’t want that tattoo when I’m 40, and “you’d be such a cute girl if you didn’t ruin yourself!”
The latter which routinely came from a 31-year-old male coworker when I was 16, but I digress.
I honestly remember more girls my age plus Boomer and Silent Generation women giving me hell for my looks than men like my creep-ass coworker. I think they were upset I genuinely didn’t care about what boys did and didn’t like.
It was around this age that an older woman I met through some school trip said to me, “Someday when you’re a grandmother, I don’t think you’ll be into heavy metal music and wearing skulls, and wanting that around your grandchildren?”
This is hilarious in hindsight given how many alternative clothing shops and Etsy stores nowadays sell punk, goth, and metal themed baby clothes accessories. And alternative grandparents absolutely exist.
And while punk and hardcore wound up being my ultimate realm, metal is still my roots as I also added retrowave, darkwave, and electronic in the years I began embracing my Punk Auntie By Proxy status.
But I’d rather be that neighborhood crazy monitor lizard lady with gently wrinkled tattooed skin and hair I no longer have to bleach to get that desired teal or cerulean shade, who all the local kids call “our badass granny” than have kids, let alone assume my kids would have kids of their own.
Talking down to me and trying to tell me what to be aside, I just thought it was awfully presumptuous of this lady to assume I would be a mother, let alone grandmother.
My dad was more reasonable than my mother and total strangers. Over the years, he’s said “Having grandkids would be nice but please only do this if you want them yourself, don’t do it for me.”
Because unlike my sister, I DID have some inkling of desiring kids. I had visions of being that awesome anarchist punk mom who’d let her kids have emotions, explore, dare, and be independent without going too far and being like the drunk and neglectful moms many of my friends in the scene had.
I simply had the same abusive shit, just in a different toilet. I’d give my children the familial love and emotional availability I had to perform correctly to receive, only received in anemic and infrequent bouts, or never had at all.
But as I grew up and got out in the world, meeting countless people in the alt world and outside of it, I grew less convinced that I wanted a family.
I saw what a raw deal it was for women, how many “band wives” I virtually never saw again once they had kids while their husbands were out at night or still on stage.
Hell no, this girl is IN the band.
You mean I’d have to give up my artistic expression and outlet for rage while my husband is free to keep writing songs, playing shows, and putting his hair up to go to basement hardcore shows on Saturday nights while I’m covered in spit-up and can’t even take a shower unless there’s someone else around to watch the baby?
Now, this wasn’t the case for all ALL punk families back home. Or all families, period. But it was a common enough sight that having children after I finally found a commitment-minded man with similar interests and values just lacked appeal to me.
I remember a band wife I was friendly with, whose husband’s band frequently played with mine. She wanted to go to school but it wasn’t feasible or affordable with three kids under 10 to raise. She told me through DMs, “I love my kids but I’m around them all the time with no breaks. I wish I had a job, school, and band like you.”
It made me a little uncomfortable, I didn’t think my life was some great object of envy. But I could see how lonely, unappreciated, and unsupported she felt.
Her marriage eventually fell apart, to no one’s surprise. Shortly after they separated, her husband drunkenly approached me at a show one night and told me he always thought I was cute. I felt like a deer in the headlights as we’d always been friendly, our bands played together and hung out a lot, but I had ZERO awareness he saw me that way.
I’ll give him credit for at least waiting til they were separated. Most guys in the scene who tried and gave me the “My wife doesn’t understand me, BUT YOU DO” crap definitely were not separated or divorced as they used me to emotionally jerk off, and had no plans to leave said wives or girlfriends who apparently made them miserable. But that’s a whole other essay.
No, aside from being taken aback by this simple declaration he made, my 24-year-old self was stricken by how some men will just treat the mothers of their children as practically disposable. That you could have a couple kids with someone you’ve been with over 10 years then overnight, you’re making a pass at a woman who’s been in your friend group a while. I already felt so shunted after an early life rife with abuse, why the hell would I sign up for this voluntarily?
I know this is not the case for all parents who split, and sometimes the mother is in the wrong: but that’s absolutely how I felt about it at the time. This mother was in the right and she was amazing person who clearly felt held back by her marriage and motherhood. Eventually, she took the kids to her mom upstate for lower living costs and to be able to attend college and provide a better life for them.
It was all part of a greater pattern I noticed: family, education, and lack of safety nets.
I attended a public commuter university where I had a nontraditional college experience. Many of my classmates were over 30 with a good number of them already having jobs and/or families, but there were also students in their early-mid twenties who were single parents. Namely, single moms.
I remember a woman around my age in my calculus class who had a 2-year-old son. She was a beautiful and intelligent Albanian immigrant who arrived in America with her parents and grandparents as a teenager. The Bronx now has a larger Albanian community than the Eastern European Jewish one my parents and grandparents grew up with and that I got to see the last vestiges of.
I didn’t talk much about my personal life with anyone in that class, calculus didn’t entail working in groups as often as my humanities and business classes. When I did though, I sometimes spoke of the punk and hardcore scenes but didn’t expect people whose tastes were dictated by Top 40 and mainstream TV to understand it. This was a time when people just called every subculture under the sun “goth”, and that shit is still annoying.
When I described how we’d gang up and punch Nazis who came to hardcore shows to show them they weren’t fucking welcome, long before we frequently discussed extremist groups in the mainstream media, these people thought I had a second life as an action movie star. But for the most part, we respected one another and our busy lives. This wasn’t a hand-holding college full of 19-year-olds living in dorms that assumes you have no life outside of going to class.
But one day, this woman in my calculus class happened to get up in my grill.
I thought that she was so freaking young to have a kid, a thought I was at least polite enough to keep to myself. She mentioned having him at 21. Man, when I turned 21, I was just happy I could now use my real ID to buy booze and get into 21+ shows instead of this legit Massachusetts drivers license of a different woman that was handed down from one specific phenotype of alternative woman to another.
I was busting my ass in school at that age, but also constantly going to and playing punk and hardcore shows. Being with my friends whenever possible, always hanging around the alternative quarter and seeing who was around. Having all manner of hookups good, bad, and downright hilarious.
I am so glad I got to do all that. Especially after the alternative quarter became the NYU food court, most of 8th St is vacant, and Astor Place is home to more soulless office buildings in an age where people want to fucking work at home. COVID ain’t over!
So this classmate of mine talked a little bit about her infant son when we had to split into our group again. Our third teammate was 25, single with no kids, and had a journalism job. She looking to do a career change that required our calculus class.
We talked about our career goals a little. The third girl said she wanted a career and a family. I said that maybe I wanted to get married one day but wasn’t sure, but I just wanted lizards, cats, and frogs instead of kids.
The Albanian woman smiled and shook her head. “Oh, I said the same thing. But you WILL want them one day, you’ll feel it.”
I replied, “I don’t think so.”
To which she said, “You’ll see when your friends and relatives have babies and also when you meet the right man. You’ll just know.”
I raised my eyebrow and deadpanned, “The right man for me also doesn’t want kids.”
The other woman in the group mediated the increasingly awkward vibe by piping up, “My sister is in her mid thirties and she didn’t want kids. She and her husband have a nice apartment in the city and travel all the time, they’re very happy. I’d like a career and a family, but I respect her choice.”
I shot her a grateful look.
Our teammate didn’t talk about the father of her son and I took the high road and didn’t ask. But apparently, she was able to go to school because she lived in a large multigenerational home where her mom and grandparents helped with childcare.
I honestly envied her for that. Multigenerational homes can be wonderful or incredibly stressful, but simply having that close of a family — in terms of both proximity and relationship — where you can routinely rely on them for childcare and that kid gets to grow up fostering these close bonds with their grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts and uncles…it’s honestly better than the isolationist nuclear family model, which facilitates child abuse and upholds patriarchy. (Yes, extended family can be abusive as well. But when you have less reliance on the nuclear family, there’s a stronger chance you’ve got at least ONE relative as a safe haven close by.)
It was seeing how the shitty family I wound up with just made the avoidance of kids a no-brainer for me.
And as someone who experienced several deaths in the family at a young age, I had to acknowledge the possibility of something happening to me “before my time” (whenever that is — what constitutes “before your time” and “forever” for men?) We had an anemic relationship with our aunt on my dad’s side. I haven’t seen or spoken to her since my grandmother, her mother, died in 2008. My mother always said that if something happened to her and my dad like they simultaneously died in a car accident, our aunt would be the one taking care of us til we were 18.
She wasn’t all there, and it wasn’t a loving familial relationship. But the thought wasn’t that scary.
It was a hell whole lot scarier when I was 21 and realized that my sister would be conscripted into that role if I died without a will and thus no guardianship declaration of a friend, and my children’s father was dead, absent, and/or lacked in-laws able and willing to step up.
I get it. This is grim stuff the powers that be don’t want marriage-hungry starry-eyed young women to think about. But you bet your ass I thought of it upon seeing what an easy decision it was for this classmate who had a large and supportive family, compared to my small and geographically dispersed family that was rife with abuse, little or no contact, and a lot of people dying before I even graduated high school.
She wasn’t the only young mother at my college. I met quite a few, single and married, who just happened to have children before they furthered their education. They were Black, Dominican, El Salvadoran, and of numerous other nationalities seen in my home borough. Most of these mothers were like my Albanian classmate in that they had vast childrearing support in multigenerational homes, which enabled them to work and/or attend school.
I mention this because being exposed to the daily lives of young people from a diverse variety of backgrounds was what truly confirmed my suspicions that the nuclear family was a largely white invention designed to isolate people and hold women back. It truly takes a village and some of us just weren’t born into one.
So, you certainly could say my childfree defining moments had structural elements in addition to deeply personal ones.
Which brings me to the final parable in this piece, though I can assure you I have many more.
My grandmother was put in a home a few years before all this “bingo-ing” I was experiencing at school, and even with a few men I dated in the punk scene. They proved that rebellious aesthetics don’t necessarily equate to a rebellious life.
The things I observed at the rest home were just what solidified my decision.
People whose children and grandchildren never visited, putting a rest to the idea that you won’t be lonely in old age if you have kids.
Those blank pages in the guestbook that constantly stared me in the face: this is what you have to look forward to in old age after making all this so-called sacrifice?
It was another visit to that dreary place, and my grandmother who was barely cognizant asked me and my sister who we lived with. I said I lived alone and my sister stated that she lived with her babies, her dogs and cat.
Our aunt we had the anemic relationship with acerbically replied, “I think she wants a better answer than that.”
What, we were supposed to tell our savta we were shacking up with some random dudes? We were proud of living in our places by ourselves, when it was still possible for a teacher like my sister to buy a house on her own and I had my rent-stabilized dump in The Bronx that I held onto til I bought a condo.
My sister fully chose ace and aro life with no relationships, I didn’t want one that included cohabiting til I was far older. We simply chose different, not necessarily better.
But it was seeing this “end of the line”, my grandmother totally unable to recognize the children and grandchildren she had, and living in this depressing as shit home as her neighbors in the same wing rarely or never got any visitors. They may have been in this same exact predicament at 87 had they chosen differently in their 20s-40s.
So I knew right then that I wanted to live my life to the fullest, make up for lost time, and be able to take risks and chase my dreams in a way that motherhood would never allow me to. Any doubts or FOMO immediately vanished along with several residents’ cognizance.