American Self-Determinism?

As an American, one of the ideals I hold most dear is the idea that I can be whatever I want to be - this ideal of self-determinism is as American as apple pie. We have all been indoctrinated from birth that we live in a great country where we can aspire to be anything - even the President of the United States - if we truly apply ourselves and give it everything we have. We are taught that America is the "land of opportunity", that people flock here from around the globe for the chance to live a prosperous life of their choosing. I may be growing weary and cynical with age, but I generally still believe this to be true and am grateful to live in a country where I can determine my own path in life. A woman like me wouldn't fare too well in Afghanistan.

Yes, American self-determinism is alive and well. There is one big caveat, however, for Americans who also happen to be women. You can be anything you want to be - a doctor, lawyer, executive, President or Indian Chief - as long as you are also a mother. This is where American self-determinism hits a wall. While it's true that one can certainly choose not to be a mother (take me, for instance), this lifestyle choice is not supported, sanctioned, encouraged or in most cases tolerated in our country. How many childfree-by-choice role models did I have growing up? None. How many tax breaks do I get as a childfree person? None. How many television shows or films feature lead characters who are childfree by choice? Can't think of any. How many politicians running for office are childfree by choice? I can't think of any. Do you think a childfree-by-choice person could be elected President? Doubt it.

Being a childfree-by-choice woman in this culture gets about the same reaction as announcing you are an atheist or a househusband. Everyone agrees in freedom of religion, but most people wouldn't elect an atheist as President. Most people agree that men should contribute to the care of a home, but would have a pretty low opinion of a man who stayed at home and cooked and cleaned while his wife brought home the bacon.

This is American self-determinism in a nutshell: you can be whatever you want to be as long as you select from the list of pre-approved gender-appropriate aspirations. And if you are woman, motherhood is aspiration number one.

The Empty Spot

I was talking yesterday with a pregnant co-worker who I like very much. Although she's pregnant, she is totally sympathetic to the cause of childfree people and completely respects our lifestyle choice. We were talking about having (or not having) kids and she was telling me that up until recently, she wasn't sure she wanted to have kids. She was always ambivalent about it at best.

She admitted that her decision to have a child came completely out of fear of regret. She added, "and I came to realize that it wouldn't be enough for it to be just me and my husband - there would always be an empty spot".

Ah, the mythical "empty spot". It's been around forever - this fuzzy, romantic notion that a cute and cuddly baby will bring unity and completeness to a marriage. I have never understood this. I know lots of people with kids and from what I have seen, rather than fill an empty spot, children create a void between the husband and wife. Two people who were once close now become ships passing in the night when children enter the relationship. Time that was once devoted to each other is now diverted to a new, dependent and demanding third party. I cannot imagine having a marriage that I felt was so lacking that a third party must be brought in to save it from its deficiency.

A Random Thought

Parenting is often said to be "the most important job in the world" - bringing people into the world and raising them in a way that they become positive contributors to society. At first this seems to make sense - the world will become a better place for all these well-raised, positive contributors. But if each successive generation's primary focus in life - their energy, their time, their money, their effort - is dedicated to bringing new people into the world who will be raised in a way to contribute positively to it (and on and on and on like mirrors into infinity), who is doing the actual contributing?

I'll tell you who. The people who choose to do something with their lives other than have children.

The Joy of Other Peoples' Kids

I spend a lot of time blowing off steam in this blog - justified complaining in reaction to an oppressive child-centric society. Complaining becomes tiresome after awhile, even to myself. Sometimes I feel like Archie Bunker spewing hatred out like a catharting toxic waste dump.

Today, though, I would like to impart some sunshine into this blog and talk about something positive concerning children - the joy of other peoples' kids (or as my husband says, "OPKs"). It's a topic that is brushed over in most discussions of the childfree lifestyle, but I think it's one that really deserves some focused attention.

One of the numerous joys of being a childfree person is that I can have all the happiness and fun of children without the burdens of them. I have been accutely aware of the fact that I seem to have more fun with children and derive more happiness from them then their own parents do.

Let's take my family as an example. One of my brothers has 3 children who my husband and I just adore - two girls and a boy, all under the age of 5. When we see those kids, we are just filled with joy (and they are too). They love us and we love them. We feel excited to see them and we can tell they are excited to see us too. We engross ourselves in playing with them and my husband spends our entire time with them in doing whatever he can to make them laugh and entertain them - even if this means throwing himself into walls or onto the floor. We marvel at how unique and different they are, and how they each have their little quirks and how deep and intense the love is that we feel for each of them. Every month or two we will take one of the kids for an overnight stay at our house on the weekend and I delight in thinking up fun things to do with them. We usually take them each to a special place that we think they will enjoy, like the zoo, amusement park or other places, and it's really fun to see them so happy and to see things through their eyes. We love doing crafts with them and I am excited to know that as they grow older we can share our interests with them...maybe I will teach them to cook or share my love of photography, or my hubby will teach them to play drums (they're already clammoring to get behind the drum kit each time they come over) or impart his special sense of humor onto them. We can't wait to take them camping with us and share our love of nature and animals with them. Maybe through our influence one or more of them will eventually become vegetarians - you never know.

Our time with those kids is 100% joy. Okay, maybe 90% joy and 10% exhaustion (they do tend to wear us out). The point of this is, we don't have children and we are not missing anything. Through our nieces and nephew we get all the "kid fix" we need - all the joys of loving them, seeing them grow and change, influencing them, doing fun things with them and feeling enriched by their presence in our lives. We have the best part of parenthood without the burden or responsibility.

When I see my brother and his wife with the kids, my impression is that they are just worn down. Most of the time they don't seem joyful with the kids. They love them to death - no doubt about that - but the truth is - they mostly just look tired and jaded. The kids will do things that completely bust hubby and me up and I turn to look at my brother and his wife to see their reaction, expecting them to be laughing too, and they are just staring straight ahead or just barely smirking or rolling their eyes. They've seen it all 10,000 times already and it's not special anymore. They are tired. We think it's funny when the kids are dancing and singing, dropping their pants to make us laugh and karate chopping us. We squeel, "how CUUUUUUTE!!!!" and it takes every ounce of control for me not to kiss them to death and my brother and sister-and-law (you can just read it in their faces) are annoyed that we are riling them up.

Their house is noise, mess and chaos 16 hours a day - all the hours the kids are awake. They are struggling to maintain order, to get the kids fed, the get them bathed, to deal with their temper tantrums, mood swings and illnesses, to provide for them. So it's no wonder they are jaded and tired.

Hubby and me have all the joy, fun and fulfilment we could ever want from children in only a few hours a month. The rest of the month we enjoy the other numerous aspects of our lives - our marriage, our interests, our friends, our careers, our cats, our trips, our quiet home.

If you like kids, being childfree doesn't mean you will have no kids in your life. It just means you can have the good parts and none of the bad.

More on the Stork

This animated short is just fantastic. I think it really captures the true nature of the stork.

The Stork Spot

Have you seen the new crop of parking spaces popping up in commercial parking lots across America? It's the Stork Spot - premium parking spaces for pregnant women and women with small children that are right up front next to the handicapped parking spots.

When I first saw these, I did a double-take. I had no idea pregnant women and women with small children were disabled and required special parking - I thought they were just burdened and inconvenienced by their own lifestyle choice. After all, if they were truly disabled, they could just apply for handicapped parking spots, right?

This got me thinking a little, and the more I thought about it, the more outraged I became. How is it fair that only one segment of the inconvenienced population is accommodated with premium parking? I have decided that if pregnant women and women with small children are considered so inconvenienced that they get coddled and catered to with premium parking, then it's only fair that other people who are inconvenienced also have premium parking spaces. Here are some of my ideas:

The Musclehead Parking Spot: Premium parking spots for fitness buffs who, despite their doctor's warnings against strength training every day, overdo it with 5 straight days of iron-pumping and are suffering with resulting muscle soreness.

The PMS Parking Spot: Who deserves premium parking more than crabby, cramping, bloated women whose tampons are leaking and who need to get to the restroom pronto?

The Ball-N-Chain Shopping Companion Parking Spot: Premium parking for women who insist on dragging their complaining ball-and-chain husbands shopping with them, even though their husbands hate shopping, protest, drag their feet and complain the whole time they are in the store.

The Multi-Cat Household Premium Parking Spot: If you have more than one cat, you know that pushing those 40-lb. boxes of cat litter around in the shopping cart is like competing in the Strong Man Competition. Regular parking spots in the back of the lot just will not do!

The Horny Teen Premium Parking Spot: For teens whose raging libidos require the most expedient access to the birth control aisle.

And while we're at it, I have been feeling particularly inconvenienced and burdened lately by our monthly mortgage and property tax payment. It's really putting a financial strain on us. Since we have no use for stork parking, I wonder if I could petition the generous commercial outlets that offer these parking spots to subsidize our mortgage payments instead? Being that they are so interested in easing the burdens of their customers' lifestyle choices, it seems only reasonable that they should offer us some kind of accommodation too.

In all seriousness, the Stork Spots are just not cool and when I come upon a stork spot, I zip right into it like Daisy Duke and I have no guilt whatsoever. You'll never catch me parking in a handicapped spot and I have the utmost compassion for people who are genuinely disabled. Pregnant women are NOT disabled, they are not handicapped, and if their pregnancies or small children are THAT difficult to manage that they cannot walk a few extra parking spaces, they should just stay at home with the kids and send hubby to the store, or apply for a handicapped parking permit like legitimate handicapped people. Furthermore, since stork spaces are not legal and cannot be enforced, what's the point? I'll tell you what the point is. These businesses know who butters their bread and it's FAMILIES - big SUV-driving, mass-consuming FAMILIES who spend $800 a month on groceries and $1,000 a month on plastic crap at Walmart. And those businesses just LOVE to look like the nice guys - sweet gentlemen providing parking spots for all the lovely, fragile, overburdened mommies.

Blech!

Another One Bites the Dust

I am feeling really sad about something and I thought I would share it with you. I didn't want to admit this to myself but I have finally come to the realization that I have lost one of my closest friends to childrearing.

It's not a loss in the way you might think. Yes, it's true that we spend less time together because it's harder for her to break away from the family. Our phone calls are fewer and farther between than in her pre-child days, but I expected that would happen. We don't do those long walks and talks in the park like we used to do. We can't meet up after work for dinner at a moment's notice. Actually, we can't meet up for dinner straight from work at all because there's too much to be taken care of before she can even consider a dinner out. First she's got to pick her son up from daycare, then she's got to take him home and cook dinner for him and her husband. Then she has to wait for hubby to get home so there's someone to watch her son and then - finally - at around 7:30 at night - she's finally free and we get an hour or two together.

But when we're together, we're not really together, and that's what's making me so sad. I am in mourning for the death of my friend's attention span.

In the old days, we had a true give-and-take relationship, and it was something I really treasured - the kind of friendship that is so rare - where each person shows sincere mutual interest in the other person - their ups and downs, their worries and concerns, their angers, joys and triumphs, the smallest details of their lives. It is something I have never taken for granted because I have met so few people who truly are interested in the other person. Most people are just living, walking blogs whose only desire is to have an audience to talk at.

This friend was the exception to the rule.

And now? The birth of my friend's son ushered in a complete change in her mental state. As can be expected, speaking with her on the phone now is an exercise in pointlessness with her 4 year old son continually interrupting, squeeling and demanding things. But the thing that is really upsetting me is that even when it's just the two of us - hanging out and spending what is supposed to be quality one-on-one time together, her attention span is nowhere to be found. In the old days, we could confide in each other and we'd each be rapt at attention, absorbing every word and offering each other support, advice and consolation. Now, I have to keep my stories short because I can tell within 30 seconds that her mind has wandered away. There is a glaze that comes over her eyes and then they start darting - she's not listening to me. Not only do her eyes give her away, but so do her responses - I get a lot of "yeah?", "hmmm...", "uh huh", and I can tell she hasn't heard a single word I've said. I am tempted to say something like, "I have been having suicidal thoughts lately" as a test to see if she's really paying attention.

Sadly, I have come to accept that my friend's brain has been completely rewired by childrearing and her attention span has sadly been wiped away. And when she does have the attention to have a conversation that is more than 2 minutes in length, you can guess what the conversation is about. Huggies anyone?

The final nail in the coffin is that she just had her second child and because of the costs of having two kids in daycare and the fact that she'd have to spend almost her entire salary to pay for it, she is now opting to be a stay-at-home-mom. So now, not only is her attention span gone, but there is no longer the array of topics to talk about. Her entire life is childrearing and nothing else. We can't gossip and vent about work anymore (well, I can, but what's the point since she isn't listening to me?). We can't talk about current events because the only media outlets she is exposed to now are populated by purple dinosaurs and other equally-annoying characters. No, her only interest is her kids and she can't even fake an interest in our friendship anymore.

Another one bites the dust.