Anonymous
She said ‘people say they weren’t sure if they wanted children, but I don’t believe them.’ Does she think they’re rationalising after the event? Once they know they can’t have them ‘ well, I’m not sure I wanted them anyway?’
If she knew what contortions we who were ‘ambiguous’ about having a child put our minds through, if she knew what peace it would give us to know whether we did or not, if she knew how hard we work to try and separate our ‘true and deep’ desires from the pronatalist conditioning that we swim in - a futile task by the way, as we’re so saturated in it.
If she knew how very far from straightforward it is - let alone that some people actually can’t envisage having a child unless they have a partner with whom they can feel good about the prospect of a child. They may not be able to let themselves even consider it. Let alone consider it as a lone parent.
How easy it is to blurt out sweeping, ill-considered generalisations. Surely all women want children she says. She did. She knew she did. I too have held children, the children of others, and wept inside, feeling both the unmet longing and the joy. And does that mean that I wanted a child? Is it a ‘given’?
That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? It’s natural, isn’t it? To want them?
That this is not true seems so evident to me that I can hardly marshall the arguments against it. So the women who say they don’t want children - they are deluded, they’re kidding themselves are they? They don’t know their true desires?
And what is actually meant by ‘wanting children’? So many women make no definite choice. ‘We’ll stop using contraception and see what happens’. So many women just go along with the idea that having a family is just what happens when you get into a serious relationship or a marriage. You get married, you have a family. Does that ‘line of least resistance’ constitute a choice?
How do they know they are making that choice as autonomous, independent people? Can there be such a person - someone who stands completely outside the conditioning of their own culture, that has brainwashed them since birth as to what it means to be a woman? A normal, natural woman?
There are no principles, no rules and nothing that is true for everyone.
There are only women and their stories. Often full of pain, regret, and questions that cannot be answered, but cannot be laid to rest.
Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash