Want to Know What It’s Like Not to Have Kids?
I may very well end up having a stranger wipe my butt.
I love kids! Sort of. Except, not really.
They’re kind of annoying. And way too noisy. I can’t stand the whining, the wailing, the whys, the inexcusable refusal to just cooperate, pa-leeze.
I’ve heard your darling daughter channeling Satan on the opposite end of a warehouse-sized store. I’ve seen her face flame crimson and her back arch in the shopping cart like she was about to levitate right out of the cereal aisle.
Mere seconds after telling junior, “I said no,” I’ve watched you crumble under the velocity of his outburst, chucking handfuls of M&Ms at him like you were fending off a rabid badger.
I’ve witnessed you try to reason with your kids as they seize impulse merchandise in the checkout lane. But it’s already an hour past their nap time and they don’t need another Bic lighter. Your children are freaking unreasonable.
Kids will smear your white pants with the finger that was, only moments ago, excavating their left nostril. They will sneeze right in your mouth. They don’t even apologize for it.
And the questions — oh my God, the incessant questions are enough to make you run screaming into the night. The ability to watch the same Disney movie seven hundred times in a row.
I heard a kid singing the Baby Shark tune in Target one day and my left eye started twitching. I thought I was going to stroke out. The person responsible for that awful song should be hog-tied and smeared with baby boogers.
If you don’t know what the Baby Shark tune is, your life is bliss. Don’t ever look it up. It enters your cranial jukebox matter and then randomly plays like a sadistic broken record stuck on repeat.
Most of my friends had kids. Well, technically they still do, but their kids are wiping their own butts now. I was only an onlooker in their lives but just watching them grow up was exhausting.
As one by one my friends became new mothers, there was invariably an interrogator — quite often the mother of the new mother — who would see me holding the latest bundle of joy and then give me The Look.
Without fail, The Look was always followed by the interrogator shining a blinding spotlight in my face. You know, like a cop trying to keep a suspect a bit off-kilter while he peppers him with questions?
The words might be different, but the tactic was always the same. The interrogator would begin to pace back and forth in front of me Perry Mason style, hands clasped behind her back, forcing me to take the stand.
“So, when are you going to have one?”
All eyes in the jury box would shift expectantly to me, the defendant. “Um, I don’t know,” I’d mumble, looking away, guilty as charged.
Instinctively, I knew if I blurted out, “The twelfth of Never!” the gavel would start banging and there would be no order in the court. People would snatch their newborns from my arms and run screaming from the courtroom.
I wasn’t even in a relationship, for crying in my soup, but it didn’t seem to matter as long as I was on the prescribed path to procreation.
Don’t misunderstand me. I like babies. They have that delicious new car smell. I can rock a sleeping baby with the best of them. As long as they’re not hungry, pooping, wailing, sick, or colicky, I think babies are amazing.
It’s once the walking and talking starts that things get sketchy. I have zero desire to repaint hallways decorated by Crayola, cook and serve food that gets thrown away untouched, or drive a minivan that has french fries squashed into the seat crevices.
And I can only answer the same question so many times before I crack. I’m sorry, I just don’t have it in me.
My beau has twin grandkids now, a boy and a girl, and I swear I love them — but dear God — two three-year-olds at the same time is just cruel and unusual punishment. I’ve never said no and don’t do that as much in fifty years as I do in just one week in their presence.
I was taking a shower recently when the bathroom door suddenly flung open. Kind of a nerve wracking feeling when you have relatives in the house that aren’t yours. It was my beau’s granddaughter, who walked over and held up a piece of scribbled paper to the shower door glass.
“Wook what I did, Gramma!” she said, showing me a page from her coloring book.
“That’s great, honey,” I replied. “Do you think you could go out and shut the door now?”
All I ask in life is the ability to shower alone.
It isn’t that I don’t appreciate what a hard job parenthood is — in fact, it is quite the opposite. I have a lot of respect for people who take on the responsibility of raising humans and even more for those who do it well. It’s the hardest damn job on earth, and you don’t get vacation pay or sick time.
I just knew I never wanted to fill out that application.
One of my best girlfriends had three boys. The eldest was carefully bubble-wrapped like a porcelain doll. By the time baby three arrived (little Mr. Oops arrived late to the party), mom had grounded the helicopter and turned in her pilot’s license.
One lovely summer day when Mr. Oops was a toddler, I pulled into their driveway to find mom swaying casually on the porch swing, one leg tucked comfortably underneath her, a refreshing wine cooler in hand. She behaved as if all was perfectly normal.
Mr. Oops was happily playing in the grass. As he stood up, I realized he was more than a little grubby and had a scraped knee. He was clutching the neck of a glass bottle, which appeared to be one of mom’s empty wine cooler bottles. The kid was butt naked.
“Um, do I need to call social services?” I asked, stepping out of my car.
“Oh, he’s fine,” she replied with a casual backhand wave.
Another time I spent the night there and after showering I asked her for a hair dryer. She rummaged around her bathroom cupboard and finally said, “Wait, I think it’s out in the garage.”
“Your hair dryer is in the garage?” I asked, unable to think of one good reason why.
“I think the boys were using it to dry paint,” she said.
“Clearly,” was my dry reply.
Sometime in my late 30s, I was on a flight from the U.S. connecting in Paris and seated next to a friendly man who began to chat with me. Being rather introverted, I don’t often have spontaneous conversations with strangers, but we ended up talking through quite a bit of our 8.5 hour flight.
I found out he was en route to India to visit family. He was a divorced doctor living and working in Minneapolis and had two kids.
He asked me if I was married (nope, divorced) and whether I had kids (nope, none). “Do you want kids?” He waited with dark eyebrows raised, a half smile on his face, eager for my affirmative answer.
“No, not really,” I said.
His eyebrows crumbled. We talked for a few more minutes before he suddenly interjected, “You don’t want kids? …Ever? …Why?”
I think it was the first time anyone had ever asked me the question outright, and for a moment I didn’t know what I should say. The blinding spotlight feeling from bygone baby showers had returned and was disorienting me again. It was clear I was going to disappoint him.
I finally shrugged and told him the truth. “I’ve never really felt a longing to be a mom. Not like my friends did. Raising kids is a lot of work; I don’t think I’d be very good at it.”
Our conversation, which had been easy breezy across a couple thousand miles of open water, turned quietly sedate by the time we crossed over land again. We disembarked in the City of Lights and parted to find our connecting flights.
There was a time, many years ago, during my rather brief marriage, when I thought kids might be part of the equation. Not because I desired them, but because I was young and assumed that was just what one did. Get married. Have babies.
The union didn’t last and the babies didn’t come, and looking back, I’m glad for both.
Of course, many people want children, and if you do, go get ’em, Tiger. Raise amazing humans.
But I also see parents who don’t seem to enjoy their kids one little bit. Maybe they thought they had to get married and have babies. Maybe they just couldn’t take the pressure that comes with not having them. It’s a pressure I understand well.
The top three questions I am asked are what I do, whether I’m married, and if I have any kids. It’s not easy to spend decades disappointing everyone around you with your reluctance to reproduce.
As I grow older sans offspring, I do think about the fact that I’ll likely spend my end years alone without family to care for me, should I need it. But fear of aging alone isn’t a great reason to have kids.
I have a good friend who is almost twenty years older than I am. Her husband had children from another marriage, but they never had any together. His kids lived with their mother and only visited on occasion.
Like me, she never desired motherhood.
We’ve known each other a long time now, almost thirty years, and I was curious how it is that we’ve remained close friends even with a generational age difference. So I asked her once why she keeps me around.
“I don’t have any kids,” she shrugged. “When I get old, who do you think is going to wipe my butt?”
