Childfree — By Choice or Chance
There’s Another Option
As I’ve reached out to find and connect with others who are childfree, I’ve started to feel like an outsider, again. I say again because being a child-free person surrounded mostly by people who are or have parented can, at times, feel alienating. Yet, with each article I read and each video I watch, I notice a now-familiar distinction being drawn between being childfree by choice versus by chance. By highlighting this difference, it’s as if there is only one way to arrive at such a happy state. However, I’ve always felt that…
most of us come to a child-free life through a combination of choice and chance because life is filled with paths of circumstance that lead to decision-making points.
We walk these paths repeatedly. For example, we have no control over the family into which we are born, and family can be a major factor that influences many of our life choices. Yet at some point(s) in life, we decide when and how often we want to interact with members of our family. Similarly, the situation in which we meet a partner often happens by chance, yet the decision to stay or leave that relationship happens over and over again. Even when it comes to infertility, if we are honest with ourselves and look back on our journey, many of us realize that we decided to wait to have children. The price of that decision was infertility because of advanced reproductive age or other health reasons that could not be controlled. In the end, the many decisions we make combined with chance occurrences help to determine what becomes of this bigger picture called life.
When we engage in binary speak, by saying this or that, we discount an important factor — time.
I grew up in a firmly pro-natal family and community. No one I knew ever talked about having a life free of children. To this day, I have the impression that such a thought was never considered. I was expected to get married and have children (not a child, but children…at least two!). Family, your namesake, and legacy were pivotal to being a whole person and required children in order to be of consequence. As a result of this upbringing, I did not doubt that I would get married and have children one day.
At 23 I met someone special. He had never held a baby before the birth of my first niece and told me that he never wanted children. I had my doubts. He found babies fascinating and even played Santa Clause for the kids who lived down the hall from his parents. After dating for more than a year, he asked me to marry him. I accepted his proposal and married him realizing that it may mean that we never have children yet held on to the possibility that he would change his mind.
During our time together, I suffered several side effects when taking birth control pills. Reaffirming that he never wanted children and knowing that I was committed to being with him forever, I asked a doctor about options for sterilization. However, he made it clear that no doctor in the area would comply with my request with me being in my 20s (as is still the case in many areas of the US, today). In the fourth year of our union, and a few short weeks after my husband’s Green card arrived in the mail, he informed me that he wanted a divorce — a declaration that came without discussion or warning. Suddenly, all I could think was, “I’m glad we didn’t have children together!”
My ex-husband later re-married and had two children. However, after such a devastating experience with him, my picture of family centered more around having a stable partner with whom I can share my life than around a stable partner with whom I could have children. As it turns out, finding a life-long, loving companion during my child-bearing years was like trying to light a paper using a magnifying glass with no sunlight. As I fast approached the age of 40, my new husband and I learned that my eggs were behaving like a car coasting to a slow stop as it runs out of gas — a process which, unbeknownst to me, began several years earlier. Considering the news of my fast-approaching barrenness, we decided to try for a child.
Following an unsettling dive into the world of infertility and the specialty clinics that assist potential parents, I ended up alone and again thankful that I didn’t have a child with yet another person who wasn’t prepared to nurture and cherish a relationship with me.
This was the point when I took a full inventory of my life and realized that being single and child-free afforded me the chance to live and study abroad, leave a job that I hated with no other job on the horizon, and hop on a plane to attend the destination wedding of a friend. When it felt like my world was collapsing under the weight of politics and an extended government shutdown, I jumped at an old friend’s invitation and flew to Okinawa to explore an island in a part of the world I’d never seen.
I value having options that present themselves by chance and choosing to snatch those moments and fully immerse myself in life-changing experiences.
When I look at my life across time, I realize that becoming childfree is as much about chance as it is about choice. I chose to actively guard against having a child early in my life. However, by chance, I experienced early-onset menopause, which rendered me practically infertile by age 40. Over time, both choice and chance have reached into my psyche to direct portions of my life in ways that I can never forget and will never regret.
When it comes to why I am childfree, the answer is much deeper than circumstance or any one decision I ever made.
Getting to know and truly seeing someone means understanding how they have developed to become who they are today…and that takes time. Instead of pitting choice against chance, another option is to recognize that humans are complex beings made up of a sum of experiences derived from events that happen both by choice and by chance.
