I vote yes!! 😂 although i have had moments of wanting a baby and it started after 30--- i dont feel unfulfilled about it .🤷♀️ Its just a different way to go. As humans, like you pointed out we can resist urges. Like the urge i have to be violent towards blatant mysoginists that lord their power over me! 😇 Ahhhh nature ...
I have women in my circle of friends who either consciously or unconsciously carry or have carried the desire for a child. Whether this can be explained by their biology or their socialization, I don't know.... I therefore find what women do not say or do not justify interesting and worthy of discussion. ... When you meet women who tell you that "maybe you'll feel differently one day" describes this one probability, one guess or a vague idea of something important. Have you ever felt that?
Perhaps because they experience you as provoked or feel that something is moving you, with which they resonate. As far as you don't see it as invading your privacy but as an identity of women: Does that change your indignation that it's nobody's business?
For me, it was more the reverse comments, because really none could imagine that I would one day become a mother. I was probably the least of them all.
Has anyone ever asked you from the bottom of her heart if you could imagine being a mother and how deeply and for how long have you given in to this question? Once you ignore everything that seems outrageous to you, does that change anything? I have found that the women who chose not to have children (either consciously or never really thought about it) were sad or had a feeling of loss to deal with in hindsight.
Which I don't mind at all. Just a matter of womanhood. In my society, such fundamental questions are usually overlooked very quickly and they are not treated spiritually enough... but that's just my position...
The way I see it: we are women. And why should we not go very deep into ourselves and ask ourselves - and others - about this question? Simply because we're the ones who have kids.
I do not know many women who revealed themselves saying, "I have decided against having children because I have found something in life that expresses the same creative power as the birth of a baby.
In a birth - if it goes well - several things happen simultaneously: the creative combines with the physical. The desire of women to experience this (inexplicable) is human, I think. Even though some of the speeches were clumsy. Which I attribute to the fact that we hardly have any language for it in this economized world and therefore do not deal with it very eloquently. So I come back to your suggestion to describe this concept of the biological clock as unfortunate and rather to replace it with something more positive and less defensive. Perhaps that the act of childbirth and the lifelong task as parents can be the final exit from one's own childhood and contributes a lot to seeing one's own parents with different eyes. It's a generation present. One might ask: How do you think about the generational gift and consider it for yourself? If so, why? If not, why not?
Good, your hint that non-parents can also take on parental and adult duties. My brother, who is the only one in the family who has no children, has taken an enormous number of children from his environment under his wing and takes very good care of his nieces and nephews. As siblings we are even quite happy about it, because he has completely different capacities than that of parents.
I think your being hit by criticism - if you let out the insulting thing about it - is often an indication (albeit a painful one) that something still needs to be processed. ...
In retrospective, I WISH that someone would have asked this serious question and that my decision WOULD have been made by me after a serious contemplative time. So taking the decision as being made in a way which lifts the unconscious to the conscious in a needed way. As this actually does not take place from where I am, the clumsy and unfortunate questions must serve the purpose ...
Well, I haven't decided on anything either way, nor have I ever claimed to. Personally, it's not that I feel under siege. It's a question that isn't particularly important to me. I have never felt any compulsion to have children, but I'm not disgusted by it either. It's an emotion that doesn't feel natural to me. My mother was the same way. She openly admits to me that I was an accident after she had made the conscious choice not to have children, but it was very late in life for her and really her last chance, so she made the last minute decision to go through with her pregnancy. She will readily say that it was a huge life change and one that came with many sacrifices, but that she's thankful that I am in her life and she loves me very much. I don't take offense to that stance, particularly at this age; I completely understand. I don't expect of my mother that I would have been this emotionally profound miracle that filled her with joy when she found out that she suddenly had to make a choice to have a baby or not. This post is a more general criticism of a phenomenon I've observed not only in my own interactions with people but also with others. It can be very hurtful because not all women are capable of having children and it can be emotionally harmful to imply that there is something wrong with not having them when you don't know a person's circumstances or innermost feelings. I write a fair amount about feminism and how I see our interactions as women, and I see this as a feminist issue--the assumption that women must have children or else they are somehow incomplete.
I have contemplated the thought many times and wondered why I don't feel compelled by either stance, but I also know that thought has been amplified by people telling me that I need to make a choice, when I still have at least a decade to do so. The point for me is that having a baby or not, whether by adoption or by physically giving birth, will not make me more or less of a woman, but it would change my life profoundly. Maybe I will feel more resolute in my opinions about whether or not it's something for me later on, but it's also rude of others to tell me that I absolutely will go through that when they simply don't know my circumstances and I never asked them for their advice about my womb. And of course this is partially influenced by my own mother's stance on womanhood and the feminist ideals that she raised me with, and that I've never had the pressure from my family that many women experienced. It's always been made clear to me from the very beginning that it's my decision. I just wish that other women didn't have a society around them that was trying to make the decision for them or else make them feel bad about it.
Anyway, thank you so much for your thoughtful comment :)
Rest is good, but we can't stop the clock altogether....
Only just thinking this dinner time, how my grandmother may have been a cold hearted mother to my mother for not having had a biological clock left to her at all since the age of 12 (Peritonitis extended to uterus: hysterrectomy).
There has to be so much she never "got" that was relevant to her daughter. Periods were a massive source of messy irritation for my grandmother, not my mother who had them and did her best not to make a mess with the limited means/washable ill fitting pads that were available back then; the pregnancies/childbirths of my mother was ignored by her; and bonding never appreciated. It made her seem quite autistic to our minds, locked up in herself, and poorly grounded somehow (always twisting ankles for it). It is a pity she never wanted to understand herself (or could not, with the age not ripe for it) and how not having become a mother does redefine your womanhood (in an interesting way). You have to make peace with that and it's got very little to do with nature as you so aptly point out. It is precisely about emphasising the I Am that any I is once it makes conscious decisions. The non-mothers may serve to lead the mothers out into a more conscious front of clear choice, rather than automatic pilot (bio-clock).
Basically I am echoing all your valid arguments why people should not interfere with personal choices regards having children. It's a bit arrogant, aswell, to assume we "have"a baby like something off a menu. You are lucky to get pregnant and for the bun to rise in the oven as per the standard recipe (in sound health). A gardener gardens but the plant grows.
It is not even so much a private affair but more an intimate one (shall we leave it up to love!?).
As marginal note, it is unmistakeable from the perspective of a parent, that the women I know who do not have children (regardless of having given birth or not) - at 40 to 60 - are a different type of woman than the mothers. (The same can be said for fathers who care about their children - which is far from "natural"!) I come very close to falling into that group of not-the-mother-type women, because I'm more a selfish arty type. I have a Virgo ascendant which helps where a natural wish to become a mother never much existed, beyond the curiosity of this creative faculty I didn't really expect to have much of (I seemed infertile most of my life).
From that perspective I can say, in my personal case, a spiritual perspective furthermore, motherhood healed or fixed something for me nothing else might have been able to. Not all childless women need to "be sorted out by a child"! Some women are simply not meant to be a mother (even if they are naturally cut out to be one). Besides giving birth (as prompted once upon a time by ovulation) is no way near the same thing as mothering. Childless mothers can still mother (cats and dogs or great aunts and the homeless).
In sum, the whole debate whether to consider motherhood or not should be left in the domain of intuition. I challenge anybody to intuit accurately for anybody else (technically possible but highly rare) and they may gently, indirectly, suggest something worth mulling over on that front, in your own good time. More in support of your own as yet unspoken notions. Not to accommodate traditional expectations. God! How can such boring people still exist in 2018!? Tedious.
Thanks for sharing this amazing post. We are still have a long way to go in Africa with this.
Let humans be responsible for their choices without interference.
Besides, adoption is also a process of having kids. It must not be until we give birth before we can become mothers.
Women rock!,we will keep fighting to be ourselves in a world where they want to turn us to someone else.
It's funny that you say that--your country has the highest birth rate in the world! Do you find that there is a lot of pressure to have children? And yes, adoption is a gift not only to a child but to the world, and it is a wonderful form of motherhood. :)
Women who can't give birth face a lot of pressure from family and even friends. And adoption is not encouraged here.
We need proper education on birth control. So many children and few resources to go around.
I take it someone really pissed you off about this...Well, just screw them, okay? What the hell do they know? People who think they have a right to interfere with someone else's life, unasked, automatically lose points in my book.
It's your choice and yours alone and it seems to me, it's often a hard enough choice, without random strangers butting in, so ignore them ;)
Great points. It is the woman's choice. As an older woman I do lecture my nieces not to wait too long because age does cause you to get tired, but I wouldn't pressure them because it's their choice. I do agree that some people have reasons they don't want babies and that it is better that not all people do it :)
My biology kicked in before I was ready to really consider these things (teen mum) but I did get the urge to have another kid in my late 30s. So I had one :p
Some of my friends (now in their 40s/50s) didn't have kids. Some were conscious choices, others not... circumstances. My sis-in-law always said she would never have kids, didn't want them, but changed her mind in her early 40s. She now has a lovely daughter and dotes on her (whilst still juggling a fab career).
Yes, it's important to acknowledge we are all different and have different priorities, urges, preferences. And people need to butt their noses out of other people's uteruses.
It's so interesting to me. No one cares if men have fathered a child. Or even if they're bothering with patenting those they've fathered. I knew i wanted children even as a young girl, and i feel passionately about the larger world honoring my work of bringing up the next generation, but i could give two shits about what any other woman decides to do. Being a mom has taught me a lot, but there are also things i missed. So it goes. I just wish women could be honored for whatever they do. I feel like damned if we do and damned if we dont. As soon as i had kids it was a whole host of inappropriate questions about my boobs, vagina, and parenting. Everything we do or dont do is under the microscope. Everybody needs to mind their own damn business. Thanks for sharing. I honor your child free womanhood, sister.
I honor your child-full womanhood, as well! Who knows what will happen in the future with me. All I know is that people need to stop being so interested in women's personal choices about their health and about their bodies. Women without children are not incomplete! I don't get how some people don't get that.
It's really bizarre. People feel totally comfy asking crazy questions about our life choices and body and then criticizing each and every step. People love telling me how to parent as well. It's sort of shocking. Only you get to say what makes you complete, and what does that even mean anyway? How is a human completed?
Everyone is different .. ...with different needs and wants. It astonishes me how many people over step the privacy boundaries of others without even realize they are doing it.
I vote yes!! 😂 although i have had moments of wanting a baby and it started after 30--- i dont feel unfulfilled about it .🤷♀️ Its just a different way to go. As humans, like you pointed out we can resist urges. Like the urge i have to be violent towards blatant mysoginists that lord their power over me! 😇 Ahhhh nature ...
<< bad joke was here >>
Uhhhmmm what? Lol im glad you liked your own joke but im le confuzzed
<< went off on a random tangent right about here >>
Right, I understand the etymology of the word however I'm not sure I understand why it's relevant?
I see your point and apologize if I was overly annoying. I will withdraw the comment.
I have women in my circle of friends who either consciously or unconsciously carry or have carried the desire for a child. Whether this can be explained by their biology or their socialization, I don't know.... I therefore find what women do not say or do not justify interesting and worthy of discussion. ... When you meet women who tell you that "maybe you'll feel differently one day" describes this one probability, one guess or a vague idea of something important. Have you ever felt that?
Perhaps because they experience you as provoked or feel that something is moving you, with which they resonate. As far as you don't see it as invading your privacy but as an identity of women: Does that change your indignation that it's nobody's business?
For me, it was more the reverse comments, because really none could imagine that I would one day become a mother. I was probably the least of them all.
Has anyone ever asked you from the bottom of her heart if you could imagine being a mother and how deeply and for how long have you given in to this question? Once you ignore everything that seems outrageous to you, does that change anything? I have found that the women who chose not to have children (either consciously or never really thought about it) were sad or had a feeling of loss to deal with in hindsight.
Which I don't mind at all. Just a matter of womanhood. In my society, such fundamental questions are usually overlooked very quickly and they are not treated spiritually enough... but that's just my position...
The way I see it: we are women. And why should we not go very deep into ourselves and ask ourselves - and others - about this question? Simply because we're the ones who have kids.
I do not know many women who revealed themselves saying, "I have decided against having children because I have found something in life that expresses the same creative power as the birth of a baby.
In a birth - if it goes well - several things happen simultaneously: the creative combines with the physical. The desire of women to experience this (inexplicable) is human, I think. Even though some of the speeches were clumsy. Which I attribute to the fact that we hardly have any language for it in this economized world and therefore do not deal with it very eloquently. So I come back to your suggestion to describe this concept of the biological clock as unfortunate and rather to replace it with something more positive and less defensive. Perhaps that the act of childbirth and the lifelong task as parents can be the final exit from one's own childhood and contributes a lot to seeing one's own parents with different eyes. It's a generation present. One might ask: How do you think about the generational gift and consider it for yourself? If so, why? If not, why not?
Good, your hint that non-parents can also take on parental and adult duties. My brother, who is the only one in the family who has no children, has taken an enormous number of children from his environment under his wing and takes very good care of his nieces and nephews. As siblings we are even quite happy about it, because he has completely different capacities than that of parents.
I think your being hit by criticism - if you let out the insulting thing about it - is often an indication (albeit a painful one) that something still needs to be processed. ...
In retrospective, I WISH that someone would have asked this serious question and that my decision WOULD have been made by me after a serious contemplative time. So taking the decision as being made in a way which lifts the unconscious to the conscious in a needed way. As this actually does not take place from where I am, the clumsy and unfortunate questions must serve the purpose ...
Well, I haven't decided on anything either way, nor have I ever claimed to. Personally, it's not that I feel under siege. It's a question that isn't particularly important to me. I have never felt any compulsion to have children, but I'm not disgusted by it either. It's an emotion that doesn't feel natural to me. My mother was the same way. She openly admits to me that I was an accident after she had made the conscious choice not to have children, but it was very late in life for her and really her last chance, so she made the last minute decision to go through with her pregnancy. She will readily say that it was a huge life change and one that came with many sacrifices, but that she's thankful that I am in her life and she loves me very much. I don't take offense to that stance, particularly at this age; I completely understand. I don't expect of my mother that I would have been this emotionally profound miracle that filled her with joy when she found out that she suddenly had to make a choice to have a baby or not. This post is a more general criticism of a phenomenon I've observed not only in my own interactions with people but also with others. It can be very hurtful because not all women are capable of having children and it can be emotionally harmful to imply that there is something wrong with not having them when you don't know a person's circumstances or innermost feelings. I write a fair amount about feminism and how I see our interactions as women, and I see this as a feminist issue--the assumption that women must have children or else they are somehow incomplete.
I have contemplated the thought many times and wondered why I don't feel compelled by either stance, but I also know that thought has been amplified by people telling me that I need to make a choice, when I still have at least a decade to do so. The point for me is that having a baby or not, whether by adoption or by physically giving birth, will not make me more or less of a woman, but it would change my life profoundly. Maybe I will feel more resolute in my opinions about whether or not it's something for me later on, but it's also rude of others to tell me that I absolutely will go through that when they simply don't know my circumstances and I never asked them for their advice about my womb. And of course this is partially influenced by my own mother's stance on womanhood and the feminist ideals that she raised me with, and that I've never had the pressure from my family that many women experienced. It's always been made clear to me from the very beginning that it's my decision. I just wish that other women didn't have a society around them that was trying to make the decision for them or else make them feel bad about it.
Anyway, thank you so much for your thoughtful comment :)
Rest is good, but we can't stop the clock altogether....
Only just thinking this dinner time, how my grandmother may have been a cold hearted mother to my mother for not having had a biological clock left to her at all since the age of 12 (Peritonitis extended to uterus: hysterrectomy).
There has to be so much she never "got" that was relevant to her daughter. Periods were a massive source of messy irritation for my grandmother, not my mother who had them and did her best not to make a mess with the limited means/washable ill fitting pads that were available back then; the pregnancies/childbirths of my mother was ignored by her; and bonding never appreciated. It made her seem quite autistic to our minds, locked up in herself, and poorly grounded somehow (always twisting ankles for it). It is a pity she never wanted to understand herself (or could not, with the age not ripe for it) and how not having become a mother does redefine your womanhood (in an interesting way). You have to make peace with that and it's got very little to do with nature as you so aptly point out. It is precisely about emphasising the I Am that any I is once it makes conscious decisions. The non-mothers may serve to lead the mothers out into a more conscious front of clear choice, rather than automatic pilot (bio-clock).
Basically I am echoing all your valid arguments why people should not interfere with personal choices regards having children. It's a bit arrogant, aswell, to assume we "have"a baby like something off a menu. You are lucky to get pregnant and for the bun to rise in the oven as per the standard recipe (in sound health). A gardener gardens but the plant grows.
It is not even so much a private affair but more an intimate one (shall we leave it up to love!?).
As marginal note, it is unmistakeable from the perspective of a parent, that the women I know who do not have children (regardless of having given birth or not) - at 40 to 60 - are a different type of woman than the mothers. (The same can be said for fathers who care about their children - which is far from "natural"!) I come very close to falling into that group of not-the-mother-type women, because I'm more a selfish arty type. I have a Virgo ascendant which helps where a natural wish to become a mother never much existed, beyond the curiosity of this creative faculty I didn't really expect to have much of (I seemed infertile most of my life).
From that perspective I can say, in my personal case, a spiritual perspective furthermore, motherhood healed or fixed something for me nothing else might have been able to. Not all childless women need to "be sorted out by a child"! Some women are simply not meant to be a mother (even if they are naturally cut out to be one). Besides giving birth (as prompted once upon a time by ovulation) is no way near the same thing as mothering. Childless mothers can still mother (cats and dogs or great aunts and the homeless).
In sum, the whole debate whether to consider motherhood or not should be left in the domain of intuition. I challenge anybody to intuit accurately for anybody else (technically possible but highly rare) and they may gently, indirectly, suggest something worth mulling over on that front, in your own good time. More in support of your own as yet unspoken notions. Not to accommodate traditional expectations. God! How can such boring people still exist in 2018!? Tedious.
Thanks for sharing this amazing post. We are still have a long way to go in Africa with this.
Let humans be responsible for their choices without interference.
Besides, adoption is also a process of having kids. It must not be until we give birth before we can become mothers.
Women rock!,we will keep fighting to be ourselves in a world where they want to turn us to someone else.
It's funny that you say that--your country has the highest birth rate in the world! Do you find that there is a lot of pressure to have children? And yes, adoption is a gift not only to a child but to the world, and it is a wonderful form of motherhood. :)
Women who can't give birth face a lot of pressure from family and even friends. And adoption is not encouraged here.
We need proper education on birth control. So many children and few resources to go around.
I take it someone really pissed you off about this...Well, just screw them, okay? What the hell do they know? People who think they have a right to interfere with someone else's life, unasked, automatically lose points in my book.
It's your choice and yours alone and it seems to me, it's often a hard enough choice, without random strangers butting in, so ignore them ;)
Actually not lately! I got it a lot around my birthday last year. The most ridiculous one was from a male psychiatrist who would not. drop. it.
Great points. It is the woman's choice. As an older woman I do lecture my nieces not to wait too long because age does cause you to get tired, but I wouldn't pressure them because it's their choice. I do agree that some people have reasons they don't want babies and that it is better that not all people do it :)
Great post.
True.
My biology kicked in before I was ready to really consider these things (teen mum) but I did get the urge to have another kid in my late 30s. So I had one :p
Some of my friends (now in their 40s/50s) didn't have kids. Some were conscious choices, others not... circumstances. My sis-in-law always said she would never have kids, didn't want them, but changed her mind in her early 40s. She now has a lovely daughter and dotes on her (whilst still juggling a fab career).
Yes, it's important to acknowledge we are all different and have different priorities, urges, preferences. And people need to butt their noses out of other people's uteruses.
Very interesting read. Thanks :)
It's so interesting to me. No one cares if men have fathered a child. Or even if they're bothering with patenting those they've fathered. I knew i wanted children even as a young girl, and i feel passionately about the larger world honoring my work of bringing up the next generation, but i could give two shits about what any other woman decides to do. Being a mom has taught me a lot, but there are also things i missed. So it goes. I just wish women could be honored for whatever they do. I feel like damned if we do and damned if we dont. As soon as i had kids it was a whole host of inappropriate questions about my boobs, vagina, and parenting. Everything we do or dont do is under the microscope. Everybody needs to mind their own damn business. Thanks for sharing. I honor your child free womanhood, sister.
I honor your child-full womanhood, as well! Who knows what will happen in the future with me. All I know is that people need to stop being so interested in women's personal choices about their health and about their bodies. Women without children are not incomplete! I don't get how some people don't get that.
It's really bizarre. People feel totally comfy asking crazy questions about our life choices and body and then criticizing each and every step. People love telling me how to parent as well. It's sort of shocking. Only you get to say what makes you complete, and what does that even mean anyway? How is a human completed?
Everyone is different .. ...with different needs and wants. It astonishes me how many people over step the privacy boundaries of others without even realize they are doing it.
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Thank you so much!!