In which I realize it’s more than merely a biological function, but since I’ve been left out of the whole thing I want to chew on it around the edges a little.

If you’ve been reading this site for any amount of time, you know something of my fertility history. (If you haven’t, here’s the article about my Worst Miscarriage Ever – I’ve had many – and this one is about how the hospital tried to sue me for writing about it on the Internet, and here’s one about what I now believe was actually the last window of baby opportunity in my whole entire life.)

I’m now not only too old to have children (PRAISE THE LAWRD!) but I’ve had my uterus RotoRootered (AGAIN WITH THE PUH-RAYSE!) so I couldn’t even if I tried (HALLELUJAH!).

But there was a pretty long stretch of years during which it could have happened, the whole parenthood thing, at pretty much any moment. I was sexually active, half-assed about the birth control, and ovulating regularly. There was always a bit of expectancy, if you’ll pardon the lame pun, a feeling that it could be me next… but it never was.

I’ve had me some bad bouts of Baby Hots, sure, but they never lasted long and I never really could visualize myself in the role as someone’s mother. I remain pretty much convinced that I never wanted kids, not really, and I think I always believed that I never would manage to have any.

From the far side of the fertility gamut, though, the fact is that not having had any children is weird. It’s weird like being left-handed and gay and a math genius and having Tourrette’s all at once: you’re a statistical anomaly.

I can count on my fingers the number of friends in my age bracket who haven’t managed to pass along their genetic information in some form or another. Everyone else floods their Facebook and Flickr accounts with pictures of their offspring, and posts updates about number of centimeters dilated and La Leche League meetings and potty training and first day of kindergarten/first grade/middle school/high school and first steps and first bras and first trips to the DMV. There are entire galleries of geek babies in t-shirts at thinkgeek.com, and Twitpic pictures of children, and that’s just online. In real life there’s an entire cultural bias toward the impossibly gigantic value of young and new humans. It’s a club I never got to join; I just stand on the sidewalk and look in the windows feeling like a tourist.

I can relate to parents about as much as I can relate to, say, Marines.

All of which serves to make me feel like an alien observer because I’ve only been through some of those things, and only as the child, and I find children themselves to be short, strange, incomplete adults. I realize that if no one had babies the species would die out, yeah, but the whole thing is foreign to me. I can’t relate.

People define themselves by what they do and child rearing is, apparently, a fairly immersive procedure. You have to sublimate most of your own desires for about twenty years in order to fulfill society’s expectations of you and the only way to do that is to believe you’re really digging it.

And maybe you do, I don’t know. Maybe it’s awesome to have some meaning to your life beyond yourself. But from the outside, it basically looks like a pain in the ass, and most of the time your kid really isn’t that cute/clever/intelligent. What I see from the outside looking in is a small thing genetically engineered to be so cute that you’ll love it instead of kill it, morphing over time into yet another not-that-terrifically-special human being. Yawn. The parents seem to be more deeply in love than the offspring do, and they devote most of their time and energy toward the child’s growth and development and deny themselves habitually.

It looks, to be honest, like a totally crap deal, and at the end what do you have? More consumers, consuming a finite number of resources, who, no matter what you did, think you fucked up anyway.

But everyone’s so gung-ho about it that I keep finding myself building hypotheses: maybe something neato happens when you meet the child of your body? Maybe some pheromonal thing that makes you really happy about the fact that you’ll have no life of your own for twenty years, and it’s sooooo awesome and magical and special and I’ve utterly missed out on the most transcendent experience humans can have and that’s why I’m cynical and bitter.

Except I’m not cynical and bitter. I just think parenthood looks like a crap deal. Cars wear out, leases can be broken, but once you’ve given birth there’s just no backing out of the thing. It’s permanent.

And permanent stuff, now that really does scare me.

They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.
– Confucius, Analects
Chinese philosopher & reformer (551 BC – 479 BC)

I have another hypothesis: child rearing is spiritual, an object lesson in sacrifice, self-discipline, and surrender. Its permanence is built-in to keep the students from walking out of class.

If that’s the case, I’m all for it! But I repeat: you can totally learn all that shit and use a condom. Just sayin’.

I’m pretty sure that if I’d had a kid, I would not be at all the person I am today. I would not have learned TM, or lived in the Midwest, or traveled, or met my Sat-guru, or learned yoga, or stayed vegetarian. I would probably be, quite frankly, an ignorant fucking conehead.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, it works for billions of people.

I wouldn’t say I’m happier because of my childlessness; I’ll even generously say that it might be just the opposite. But I get to do the things that matter to me, and the woman I am is far more nuanced and encompassing than the creature I would have been had I succumbed to my biological imperatives.

Lately, everyone I know is hip-deep in the whole kid thing: they’re either rearing children, letting grown children go, or gearing up to have their first children. The entire process is utterly off my list and I just end up scrolling past Facebook posts about going #2 and videos of baby’s first steps and standing back by the fence at barbeques and covering my ears in the check-out line at Walmart feeling strangely left out of a club I don’t even want to join.

I think I know now why there’s a cultural symbol called The Old Maid. She really is weird, compared to the majority.