It Just Doesn't Matter

"It just doesn't matter! It just doesn't matter!"

- Bill Murray, Meatballs c.1979

Mother's Day is sometimes hard to swallow. While I love all of the moms in my life, especially my own, and want to celebrate them, I also can't wait for the day to be done and the hoopla to fade away for another year.

There's something awkward about it for me, about people telling me I am a great mom to my pets and other such silliness. It's not my day, and I'd rather not be included in it. You don't need to try to include me in it! Please! I know my dogs are not the same as children (though they do fill a niche in my soul to nurture and care for something).

Though we've been married since age 23, Chad and I never had kids.
I never managed to get knocked-up, even by accident. It wasn't for lack of interest or effort.
It just wasn't in the cards for us.

In our younger years it was about money- Not enough of it.
Then we realized there would never be enough of it.
So we did go for it pretty seriously for a few years in our mid-to-late 30s, but perhaps waited too late.
Fertility is a tricky thing. A scant 48 hours every 28 days, losing potency as the years pass.

After a few years I got checked out, scrutinized by bloodwork and other horrifying, invasive tests only to discover there was not a thing wrong with me on the child-bearing front. Of course my uterus was awesome and my ovaries wealthy! Knowing this didn't make the situation any easier to swallow. Ultimately the idea of medical assistance or scientific intervention was where we drew the line. I felt like if we used artificial means to conjure up a child who did not want to be here we were just asking for trouble. The universe was in control, not us.  Like most heart-breaks I'm sure it will all make sense in the end when we're a bit further away and can see things more clearly, with more perspective.

In being a non-parent I sometimes feel like I missed out on some universal experience and some adventures I will never know. I'm not in the club!  But that's more about my own selfish needs-- not what some kid might be missing. There is no kid that needed to have me as his or her parent.  The world is plenty populous and the universe will be just fine without my DNA extending into a new generation. 

Often I think I've been gifted with a lot of talents, and am being greedy to imagine I could have more given to me. 

I've always had a natural ease around children, an open-faced honesty they respond to, and they gravitate to me. In my younger years always had a trail of kids following me around like the Pied Piper. For many summers I was a camp counselor and an art instructor and thought about becoming a teacher because I find so much fun and inspiration being with children. If you asked me as at age 12 how many kids I might have someday I was sure I'd have a whole baseball team of my own. However, I'm 42 now and each year that passes the idea of bearing a child grows more dim. Mother's Day sometimes makes me feel a little bit like a failure, but that failure feeling is growing dimmer as well. I've let go of the notion.

Here are some other things I don't like about being a Non-Mom...

• People with kids stop inviting you to their events. They start to hang out with just other people who have kids. I am an outsider looking in. I don't know the secret handshake.
• Not knowing how to hold a newborn properly. I always feel like a klutz.
• Most holidays are no big deal. Because most of them are geared towards family and children.
• People pitying me for not having children. Sometimes I see a sad look hidden behind their eyes, like how one might glance forlornly at a hobo. 
• I didn't use every part of my body to its fullest capacity! I have organs I never used, and for this I feel bad.  I shouldn't feel this way though, because nobody does, not ever--Not unless they're an Olympic athlete who sings opera, a deep sea diver who writes novels, a mountain climber dabbling in sky diving, or something!) My boobs were never used for their primary intention! What a waste! 360 menstrual cycles, wasted. What was the point of all muss and fuss if none of it was even gonna be utilized?
• I get angry with my husband somehow, just a random faraway anger, for his half in this failure.
• If you have friends who are parents, everything else takes a back seat to the demands of raising their children- events they've been invited to but can't attend, friends, other family, their own creative dreams and ambitions.I know for a fact lots of folks use their kids as an excuse when they just don't want to do something. 
• I have such happy memories of my own childhood, and to this day remain the biggest, happiest silliest kid who never grew up. For this (plus my remarkable patience), I know I'd have been a great parent.
  I see so much beauty in the world and ache to share it with everyone.
• As much as we're told about all of the parentless children in the world needing a home, adoption seems complicated and expensive.
• I get the feeling that people think childless couples are selfish yuppies. The term DINKS refers to "double-income-no-kids". But really, aren't I more selfish if I feel I must foist my genes onto an already crowded planet?
• It must be difficult to raise children in the 21st century. I've seen family struggle with their tweens and young teens, facing issues we never had to deal with growing up in the 1970s and '80s. The internet, smart phones, cyber-bullying, sexting. With the information age, children are growing up online, with all of their exploits filling my newsfeed. Is this healthy for the child's future attitude to have spent its formative years so broadcast so constantly? We shall see how this affects them in adulthood. I like social media and the internet, but I also lived more than half my life without it, and I feel like for this reason I have more of a grasp of its reach than some kid who grew up on it. All of my teen angst is mercifully locked into notebooks stashed in a box in my closet.
• When I am very old there may be no one to take care of me or check in on me. I might end up "that crazy old lady down the street".All of my precious artifacts will end up in a landfill and all of my photo albums will end up in some thrift store, maybe to be saved by some merciful hipster. Maybe I will be my generation's Vivian Maier...if I'm lucky.
• The sense of superiority many parents sometimes get. It can be downright cruel to someone who never knew the joys of raising a child.
  Worst of all: When people say "Having children was the most important thing I ever did. Nothing else matters. My life is complete now", what I hear is "Nothing you're doing matters." and "Your life is incomplete."   

Here are some things I like about being a Non-Mom.

• Kids are a colossal, in-fathomable amount of work, expense and time. You can't even get enough peace to sit on the toilet without someone shouting for you. Children are always distracting you and commanding your attention! This is why many of my friends who are parents have forgotten their own identities as human beings, as well as their own interests.
• You can never leave kids solo, especially young ones, but I can leave my dogs at home alone anytime.
• According to a Vanity Fair poll, most parents feel their children were at their "most perfect" as newborns, followed by runner-up "when they leave the house and go off on their own as adults." Therefore, the whole middle part must be a big hassle?
• Pregnancy and birth are used as exciting plot devices on TV shows, to generate interest, just like weddings. However, most of the time after the birth the kids barely register on the radar. Think Jim and Pam on The Office. Nobody cares about the kids anymore after the big exciting birth scene! We barely ever see them again!
• Toddlers and Tiaras. People sometimes treat their kids like possessions, dolls, marionettes, something other than real-live human beings with their own goals and their own souls. It's gross.
• I can be the totally cool Auntie without any of the hum-drum, day-to-day stuff. (Though I wish I lived closer to my nieces and nephews and could spend more time with them, hum drum or not).
• Though they're in the minority, there are lots of important people I admire who've never raised children: Many artists, writers, actors, musicians, special teachers who influenced my life. No one would say these people haven't contributed to the world.
• My bod is only being wrecked by gravity and the passage of time, not by the passage of a baby through my birth canal.
• What I leave behind when I'm gone is not in the form of a human being. As an artist I make my creative mark in other ways,  leaving behind a trail of paintings, writing, photos, documentation. Probably every thing we ever put on the internet will linger forever and travel to distant planets. I often wonder if being an artist, constantly creating things both big and small, silly and serious, has already quenched some deep-seated innate craving to create that for some folks is only truly sated by creating babies. (If I had to make a choice between having artistic talent and being able to make babies, I'd definitely stick with art.) 
• My dogs will never learn to read or write, or have a conversation, but they'll also never ask to borrow the car or for help with their Algebra homework. They will never need college tuition. And they don't talk back. They will never slam a door on my face.
• Teenagers. Ugh.
• A child could be your most amazing, enriching relationship but there's no guarantee, despite all of your best efforts, that your child won't one day completely devastate you worse than any other relationship could. Parents who have lost their children to fatal injuries, accidents, drugs, crime or disease, never seem to fully recover. 

In the end, they're perhaps pretty well-balanced the pros and cons of it all.

I imagine if Chad and I had had children early in our marriage they'd be heading off to college about now anyway. 

Oh! 

That leads to one more "pro" :

• Empty Nest Syndrome. We won't ever need to go through that melancholy feeling parents get when their kids grow up and move away. 

and one more "con": 

• (Instead I guess it's been supplanted by a low-grade melancholy we've felt for years because no kid ever even bothered to show up in the first place.)

I struggled to compose this post in a way that would not offend my many friends and family members with children. Eventually I realized this post was not for them, rather it was for my legion of fellow childless folk who may share some of these sentiments. People with kids get a lion's share of attention already and don't really need any more. People like me, wondering if it's okay or not that they never managed to have kids? They need some support and encouragement too.

The autumn of my 30s

It’s autumn of 2009, and we’ve been trying to get pregnant, unsuccessfully, for 2 years.
We’re both turned 37 year. My feelings are all mixed up—sometimes dark and confused, but sometimes carefree and relieved. So, as always, as I’ve done for my whole life, I thought maybe if I wrote it down, it would make more sense. Though, sometimes writing it down, shedding light on it, only makes it more confusing. People (usually people with children) usually have lots of well-meaning but annoying words of advice, and it makes me wish my husband had never told anyone we were “trying” for a baby. Now I feel funny, different, flawed, when people know we’ve been trying and not succeeding. Maybe if I write it out I take ownership back and will lose my ugly feelings.

Apparently being a good girl all my life-- losing my virginity at 21 to the man I later married, being of robust good health, with a completely uneventful and calendar-perfect ovulation cycle-- makes me somehow less likely to conceive than:

- Every drunk ass bum that has 5 shoeless kids in a shopping cart at Wal-Mart
- The girl with who didn’t know she was even pregnant until 3 months before her due date.
- A man who used to be a woman, took male hormones for many years, but later successfully was inseminated with a turkey baster. Twice.

It's a mystery how it all works, really! In a book it seems to make sense, how it all works, but the actual practice of it is amazing--The conception of a child is a miracle. People always say that, but I never truly understood it until now. There are so many amazing variables, mixes of different body chemistry, luck of timing-- down to the most microscopic window of perfection. It's amazing to me anyone ever gets born at all. It's truly a miracle.

I wonder what I am doing wrong. Do I eat too much of something I shouldn't? Do I drink too much coffee or beer? Did my magic markers in the 1980s pollute my brain's operating system? Should I not go running as much? Is there something fundamentally amiss that I could never detect on my own, some misstep in my development, something my Mom did/didn't do when I was in the womb? Like those DES Daughters of the 1960s/70s who were born without uteruses? Are my hormones dropping the ball somewhere along the route? So many possibilities. (The main possibility we all know is that I am just too dang old now).

I get angry with my husband because maybe it’s his fault! I see him sitting on the sofa and wonder if every part of him is equally lazy, even the tiniest parts of DNA. Then I get angry with myself for being angry, because that sure ain’t conducive to nothing. Sometimes I think there's nothing wrong with either of us, other than a basic lack of communication--not just in mundane day to day life, chores, bills, what to have for dinner-- but now, evident on the most primordial level. We cannot get our acts together to make a baby.
We don't mix. Our chemistry is wrong.

When I was a kid I was the “pied piper” of youngsters (said my Mom)—all the younger kids flocked to me, and for this I always envisioned I’d be a mom someday—jokingly saying I wanted 9 so I could have “my own baseball team”. I was a camp counselor and there was a time I entertained the idea of going back to school for a teaching degree.
Kids are wonderful, amazing, hard work and full of inspiration. I had a fantastic childhood, so maybe the idea of living through another one with a child of my own, seeing the world again through childlike perspective, is one of the things that drives me towards wanting a baby. Maybe I’m just selfish. I’ve got a lot, and maybe I don’t deserve having more.

I got married young, age 23, to my college sweetheart. It all seemed like a lark because I was too young to know any better. My maternal urge didn’t kick in early, like it does for some. In our 20s we were too busy scrapping for our own survival in the harsh economic climate of our beautiful new state, with barely enough to make ends meet. We lived on love, in small strange places, and did dangerous stunts in the wilderness. No way there was enough time or energy or money for a kid added to the mix.
We also never had any “oops”, which is the way parenthood happens for many. All of my life I’d had a perfectly regular cycle—running so perfectly like clockwork that I quit the pill at age 27, and instead we used natural fertility awareness to avoid getting knocked up. The thought behind it was that when we ready to have a child, it would be a cinch!

I watched family and friends start their families without the tiniest pang of envy. It was great for them, but for me, I was going in the right direction, enjoying what our life was. I remember Chad's brother and his wife struggling with their two young toddlers, as Chad and I got our gear ready to go cross country skiing--I had no interest in trading places with them. We got older, made a little more money, and around age 29, bought a house. "Settling down," but not quite thinking of parenthood yet.

Money concerns still make problems for us, but like a friend told me, “You will always have money worries- don’t wait until your money situation is ‘perfect’- because it never will be.”

Around 35 years old, with both of us on board and in complete agreement with 100% enthusiam about this plan, we started to try for a baby. It would be a lark, a gas, an easy slam dunk! Months passed. Sex, and lots of sex, even when we didn’t wanna, or it was inconvenient. I thought I knew what was what, and when was the ideal timing, but after 6 months of failure, I started writing things down on the calendar, invested in a thermometer, and an ovulation kit. Friends who’d tried for 18 months before having luck told me, “Yeah, been there. Done that. It won’t be until you throw all of that stuff away that you’ll have any progress.” They told us we’d have to “go on vacation” to some strange locale. Strange vacations came and went, and still my monthly visitor arrived right on time, just like she had since age 12. I could not shake her.

Every time my period arrives again, I re-evaluate. I don’t get so upset any more. It’s hard to sustain that level of disappointment and bewilderment for 2 years. People ask me why we don’t get fertility treatments, shots or drugs or medical intervention. There are lots of “procedures”, all very expensive, invasive, and none guaranteed. Every month I think about all of those complicated and slightly creepy tests my doctor mentioned, and every month I forget about them. (Though I do suspect it might alleviate some of my stress to get checked out a little bit more thoroughly).

As far as fertility treatments? I am not for them. Our culture sensationalizes and glorifies that kinda stuff now-- like Jon & Kate Plus 8, and "the OctoMom", and even Brangelina, and the Hollywood people-- churning out all those sets of engineered twins. My Mom apparently had been discussing my “problem” with an aunt, and that was what was she suggested. First off, I hollered at my Mom for talking about this with “people”. It’s not for people to know. It’s for me, and my husband and maybe my immediate family. Or maybe nobody. It’s private. I don’t wanna be the topic of someone’s gossip. Besides that, what if were to go through the whole ordeal, the procedures, the operations, the drugs, the time and money—and create a child who never wanted to exist and wasn’t ever meant to be here?

What if the kid turns out to be an asshole?

I’d rather that kid show up when he or she wants to, naturally—I understand, as we get older, the chance of this decreases.

Why do I want to have a child—is it for the child’s benefit or my own?
Am a selfish dirtbag more concerned with my own feelings than how a child might feel having my husband and me for parents? What if we’d be awful parents and ruin this kids’ life? Or, what if instead of being the best of us, the child is the worst of us? Do I worry no one be around to take care of me in my senior years? Maybe. These things are all possible. Do I feel like I am missing out on “Kids Say the Darndest Things”-style hilarity? Would the world be a better more fun and amazing place if I were sharing it with an offspring? I do not know. Is it my own selfishness to take part in all that life has to offer? Childbirth is a fundamental human experience that I’d like to share in and live through. I think? Maybe I’d be better off seeing the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China, and driving to the tip of South America. These are all fundamental human experiences too, but somehow I’ve been conditioned to think of them as shallow and selfish.

I have friends who are against procreation because they think this world is bad rotten place and they wouldn’t want to bring a child into it. Or they have the type of political beliefs where they don’t eat meat, and they think the world is overpopulated. Me, I am one of those kooky types constantly mesmerized and hypnotized by the beautiful world around me. I have friends and family with young children. I admire them all but do not envy any. I am in admiration of the notion of pregnancy, and admire the women and men who've had the experience.
Each family is not without its own dynamics I’ll never understand, but can completely appreciate. If parenthood is universal it’s not always necessarily in the same language.

My brother and his wife are new parents. Seeing their baby son, at 1 month old, did not inspire more baby lust or maternal urge, as I thought it might. I thought I’d be crazy koo koo bananas for a baby after meeting him. But, in reality, it caused me to backpedal a bit. Thinking, “Wow, this looks like a lot of work. Wow, this kid is taking up all of their time and energy. They’ll have many years of this.”
The baby was a pooping-eating-crying machine. One of my brother’s friends likened his life as a new parent to that of a roadie, cleaning up bodily fluids, and messes, dodging loud noises, moving heavy equipment from place to place.

My brother and his wife both seemed exhausted, but completely happy in a beyond blessed sort of way. Very pleased with this change in their lives, and this new little human sharing their condo. There is now a way their life has forever changed, in a way I cannot share with them, and cannot relate to—only another parent could understand.

We went back home and I thought, “I’m okay with the way life is now, just us, and the dogs and the cat. No crying, no baby gums pinching my breasts, no mustardy colored poop squirting out of diapers, no worries about someone getting chicken pox, or other childhood illnesses. I won’t ever need to help with algebra homework. Sitting on the porch watching the sunset, driving my ancient 2 seater sports coupe, without a worry, without saving for someone’s college fund, just thinking of what might be the next vacation. Oh, it does seem kinda shallow.

But, doesn’t it seem equally shallow to think the world needs to have my genes continuing on into the next 100 years? Maybe the world is done with me, and I should just accept it, and be creative in other ways—in ways I am good at, like making paintings, drawings, photos and stories. Maybe it’s not in the cards for me to have 9 kids like I planned.

I met my nephew when he was a newborn, and far too young focus his eyes more than a couple of feet in front of his face. Before he could smile on purpose. I think if I’d met my nephew when he was a little older, and smiled at me, this would be a completely different story.