I Don’t Have Kids — But I’m Busy, Too

The subtle ways our culture invalidates the lives of women who don’t have children

“I’m sorry,” Leslie said in a soft voice, just as I came through the door. “There are four or five hours of chores for you to do. I offered to do some of them, but you know your dad. He doesn’t like to burden me. He told me over and over that I should leave everything for you because you’d have time to do it all. But if you can’t finish before you leave, don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”

I smiled, tightly. I appreciated the heads-up and her sensitive attention to the issue. But it also brought up a lot of resentment that I’ve had over the past several years about how much my father expects from me simply because I don’t have children and therefore, in his eyes, aren’t as busy as my five siblings.

We’ve had terse conversations about this before. Like when he said he envied how much free time I had and that in his forties, he was working night and day to keep up with the kids, the housework, and his career. And then I said, through clenched teeth, that I wasn’t any less busy — I’m just not busy with the duties of child rearing.

Then there are the times when he needs a lot of help with chores, paperwork, or other tasks — more than the usual help I provide — and he asks me to put in the additional time instead of rotating the tasks to another one of his children.

To be honest — even if this is selfish (and it probably is) — I often don’t want to put in the extra time. I already give a lot of time to him, in addition to the time I spend helping my mother, and my sister and her kids, and my brother and his kids. But if I suggest he ask Levi or Tegan to help him, he insists it must be me. “I can’t burden them,” he has told me again and again. “They have kids. They’re busy.”

I wish this were an isolated circumstance. That it was just my dad who argued with me about the validity of the activities that fill my schedule.

But it’s not.

To some extent, I understand this. I do have flexibility — especially now as a freelancer — that I imagine any mother might envy. Yes, I will cop to that. And it’s true that when I have free time (whatever that actually means), it is genuinely free in that I don’t have to include children in it.

But it’s scary to even say that out loud, because I feel like that’s evidence that just proves how “easy” I have it as someone who isn’t a mother, and therefore, invalidates my perspective, opinions, and all the little things that make up my life.

Yet I also feel that this is absolutely absurd, the way we lump all mothers into one group who supposedly have one shared experience, and then there’s all the “other” women. We don’t treat fatherhood as if every man has a similar experience of it, and we definitely don’t see men who don’t have children as less busy or less socially or economically relevant.

Why are we comparing the incomparable?

For most of my thirties, you could say that my life looked a lot like my friends’. I was up before dawn, preparing breakfast for my household, running off to work in a flurry, frantically keeping up with my daily schedule, wiping drippy noses, soothing temper tantrums, bandaging scraped knees, reading to a rambunctious audience, listening to the sound of my name being called again and again and again and again, making dinner in a fog of exhaustion, saving the last of my energy for a tumble with my partner, and falling into a coma of sleep.

The only difference was, my household was just me, my partner, and our dog. The kids I took care of were my students.

When I’ve told this story before, the immediate response has often been: “You got to leave it all behind at 3:30! Parents have their kids 24/7!”

Well, first of all, calm down. I wasn’t comparing us. I’m not implying that being a teacher is as hard as being a parent (or how about a teacher who is also a parent — talk about hard!). I’m just saying there are humorous similarities.

But also…let’s be clear that spending seven and half hours with 30–40 kids without a break (except maybe to sneak into the bathroom for a quick pee while the kids are in P.E. and you’re supposed to be prepping for math), is its own kind of hell. Trust me, you go to bed every single night hearing the echoes of all those voices calling our for Ms. W. over and over again.

It’s still not busy “enough,” though. I know because I heard that so many times from friends or family members.

And again, I ask why is this a competition? And if it is, what’s the price of losing? We sacrifice a childless woman on an altar? And by that, I mean, we shove her to the front of the line when family members need extra care and assistance?

She can take care of this. She doesn’t have any kids, so she’s got time.

“I don’t suppose you could come over in half an hour and watch Keira until 4? I have to take Alex to the doctor and then pick up the kids and it would be so much easier if I didn’t have to take her with me.”

Whenever my phone rings and it’s my sister, I always get so excited. Years ago, before she had kids, we would sometimes have long chats, and I still miss those days. But she hasn’t called just to chat in 15 years. Now, she only calls when she needs a babysitter.

But it’s okay. I love those kids so much. And I’m privileged to be freelancing and able to change my schedule at the blink of an eye.

“Absolutely,” I almost always say. “I’ll be right over.”

I can’t even count how many times in the past year I’ve dropped everything to drive to her house and help with babysitting or an emergency situation. It usually means I’ll have to stay up until one or two in the morning to finish my work, or cancel something I had planned on a weekend so I can have enough time to make up for what I lost.

But again…I really don’t mind. I will take any opportunity I can to be with my nieces and nephews.

I get frustrated, though, because that road doesn’t travel in both directions. I would never ask my sister to help me with anything. I’ve never once called her when I had an emergency. I can’t even think of the last time I even asked her for a favor.

I know she’s busy, and I don’t want to bother her.

But we still get into tiffs about it. About how busy she is. If I text or call her at an inopportune moment, she will often fire back with an angry response: “I’m busy. Can this wait?” Sometimes, she won’t answer an email for a week or two and if I follow up, she gets angry. “How can you expect me to keep up with my emails? I have six children!”

I can’t help but feel judged by comments like this. Ignoring the fact that I wish she was more gracious with the time she gives to me the way I am with her (and maybe a little kinder in her responses, too), I don’t understand why almost every conversation I have with her includes her telling me in a frustrated tone that she’s busy. That fact is not in dispute.

Am I less busy, though? Do I have less to do when she calls me to ask for emergency babysitting? Are the things on my to-do list less meaningful, less valid than hers?

It’s weird to me that it feels like I’m going out on a limb to insist that childless and childfree women are busy, too. I feel like I’m supposed to think it’s sacrilegious to say such a thing — to assume that I can (and should) take up as much space in the world as a woman who does have children.

But the older I get, the more I witness the insistence on this strange competition and the more I insist that we let it go.

I couldn’t respect mothers more. I think their fortitude, stamina, and patience is admirable in ways that words fail to express. Stay-at-home moms, working moms, single moms…all of them are remarkable human beings.

Childless and childfree women have, I dare say, similar paths. We don’t have the same experiences, of course, but we aren’t really as different as the world would have us believe. We have our own challenges and superpowers.

We have our own to-do lists, our own schedules, our own obligations and responsibilities. Just like mothers do.

Everyone is busy. And that’s all there is to it.

© Yael Wolfe 2020

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