Gisela Haensel

No kids! Do you want mine? To me, this is a thoughtless comment made by parents who are (temporarily) overwhelmed by their chosen duty to raise children. It’s a message about themselves and has literally nothing to do with me or with any compassion for my situation. This is almost worse than being bombarded with tips on how to fix it, like for example Why don’t you adopt? At least, a tip is an attempt to help me.

Parents who seemingly offer me their kids, don’t really mean it. Or do they? I’ve actually never put them to the test and pretended to take them up on their offer. Maybe I should try it one day? But why would I do that? Just to put them on the spot and make them feel the ridiculousness of their offer? And how would that help anybody? They would probably get upset that I’d even consider understanding their comment in a literal way and get ready to literally taking their kids away when they were just in the mood to complain about the hard side of parenting. I bet that as soon as I’d pretend to understand their comment in a literal way, a rush of parental love would come over them and turn them into people who are very possessive of their own children and never want to share them with anybody. I’d probably be exactly like them if I was living a life like them. But I don’t and that is what they don't seem to get. They never seem to think about the void that the childlessness leaves in my life.

Early in my childless grief, I deliberately removed myself from the world of expecting mothers and parents and their children but when I had healed enough to come back into the world, I realized that being childless pretty much emptied out my life of all children because there is no connector to other people’s children either. No sleepovers, no school events, no birthday parties… This turns out to be very hard on somebody like me who loves being around children of all ages. As a matter of fact, sometimes I literally feel deprived of children in my life, deprived of my own and of all the children they would spend time with together. And then I wish I was living in a society where bringing up children was more of a community affaire and not just left to the parents. The concept of the nuclear family puts the burden almost entirely on them and removes it from everybody else. So when I hear comments like No kids! Do you want mine? I now sometimes wish parents meant what they say and - in a careful and considerate way - made it possible for me to spend quality time with their children, not to make up for my own, but to co-create experiences that I am missing out on and the world around me as well.