“What exactly are...babies up to?  ...Stabbing at the passing bachelor with rattles and other offensive weapons, are they saying: ‘Here, sisters, is another man untrained in the matter of bottle-feeding, his elbow untempered to the correct warmth of a baby's bath, his mind blank to the symptoms of nappy rash?’  Is there an international gang of babies determined to make fathers of us all?  Who knows?  But it is certainly true that all women…go oggy-woggly-goggly at the sign of these juvenile agitators.”
—How to Avoid Matrimony, Herald Froy (a pseudonym of Keith Spencer Waterhouse), 1958 ¹


Well, a lot has changed since 1958.  An acquaintance recently shared this story with me.  She and her husband were talking about someone else’s divorce, which got them on the topic of divorce in general.  Her husband said, “If we got divorced, I’d really miss the kids.”  She shot back immediately with, “Whaddya think, I was born yesterday?  If we get divorced, you’re taking the kids!”

A real portrait of maternal warmth, she is…and a woman after my own heart.  Well, except for the fact that she has kids in the first place.  I’m in the early stages of middle age, and to the best of my recollection I’ve never even changed a diaper (or I’ve blocked out the memory).  I intend to not only keep it that way, I’m bucking for a Lifetime Underachievement Award where children are concerned.

And I am not alone.  Despite what popular culture, conventional wisdom and Herald Froy tell you, not all women want children.  If you’re a man (or a woman) who doesn’t want love and marriage to lead to a baby carriage, take heart.  There’s someone out there for you.  There was for me and my husband K—, since obviously we found each other.

K— likes to joke that he decided to ask me to marry him when he figured out that I really, truly did not want children and wasn’t saying that just to be agreeable.  The thing is, I know he’s not joking.  Answering otherwise would have earned me an automatic subscription to his “Do Not Call” list.

When we announced our engagement to K—’s parents, my future father-in-law sat us down for a heart-to-heart about money and responsibility.  Practically the first thing he said was, “You’ll have to start saving money for kids.”  K— and I glanced at one another and then K— told his Dad straight out: “We won’t be having kids.”  His Dad looked stupefied for a moment and then, well, didn’t have much else to say.  Apparently we’d dispatched his greatest fear, and with that out of the way his work was done.  I think we spent the rest of the afternoon watching a football game, which I took as implicit acknowledgment of the wisdom of our decision.

What’s really weird to us child-free-by-choice types is that what seems to compel other people to have children is precisely what compels us not to.  I once read an interview with an actress talking about working with apes for a movie in which she was starring.² She was recounting an experience holding a baby gorilla that was expectorating, pulling on her hair and doing other typical infant primate things when it, you know, let go and soiled her and her clothes mightily with ape offal.  I fully expected the next sentence to be, “So I looked around for someone to hand the gorilla to, and I never went back there again”…but no.  The next sentence, incredibly, was something like, “And sitting there, covered with gorilla spit, with my clothes smelling like a latrine, I thought to myself, ‘I just can’t wait to have children!’”

I am not imagining this.  I read it a second time to make sure I was getting it right.  I only wish I could find it again.

Herald Froy would say, “Aha!  That just proves my point!”  But some men are exactly the same way.  Not only does experience not deter them, it seems to spur them on.  A man I know named Dennis once told me in gruesome detail what it’s like to bring a newborn home from the hospital, replete with vivid descriptions of how violently an infant’s gastro-intestinal system kicks in.  His poor wife, still sore and cranky a few short days after giving birth, was holding their daughter when the kid had her first you-know-what.  This is how Dennis put it: “So I picked her up and I’m holding her wondering what to do, and the smell is just awful!  There’s only one word for what little children do, you know—it was a baby explosion!  So I…”  At this point I interrupted to say, “One thing you should know about me, Dennis, is that I have an unusually strong gag reflex.”  He took the hint, but incredibly, I learned that he’d had two more kids after that first one.

As a dedicated non-parental unit, I used to feel like the odd woman out.  But over the years, and thanks to the Internet, I’ve discovered a support system.  There are a slew of resources out there devoted to countering the monumental societal pressure to reproduce.  The best website of them all has a tongue-in-cheek bingo game. ³  Here’s how it works: childless people carry around a bingo card whose squares are filled with all the usual fatuous responses they receive to their statement that they don’t want children.  These include “you must have had a horrible childhood,” “you’re just selfish,” “someday you’ll meet someone who’ll change your mind,” “you child-hater!” and so on. ⁴  The goal is to cross off a vertical, horizontal or diagonal line of these rebuttals and yell “Bingo!”

If this seems cruel, consider this: If someone came up to me and said, “I just love children and I’m looking forward to being a parent,” and I responded with, “Just wait until you have your own.  That’ll change your mind!” I’d be regarded as a monster.  But when I say I don’t want children and people do the same thing to me, no one bats an eyelash.  The “Real Deal” where women and children are concerned is that some women want ‘em and some women don’t.  Guys: pick accordingly.  You do have a choice.

People always ask me why I don’t want kids.  There are so many reasons, it’s hard to know where to start…but I’ve found that the response that gets me the least argument is this one: I like a good night’s sleep.  I am woman, hear me snore.


¹  To the best of my ability to determine the origin of this quote.

²  Sigourney Weaver, I think, talking about Gorillas in the Mist.

³ Childfreebychoice, bellaonline’s "marriednokids" site, worldchildfree and oopsiforgottohaveababy, among others.  The bingo game can be viewed by clicking here.  The only thing these websites lack is a dating service.  I can’t believe no one has exploited this opportunity yet.  Being able to pick from among people pre-screened for their parental preferences?  It would have made my life a whole lot simpler.

⁴  The strangest reason people give for having kids:  “I thought I’d be missing something if I didn’t.”  I don’t see the difference between this and choosing cannibalism as a dietary option because, you know, you’re curious.