By Gloria Jackson-Nefertiti
All eight of us were born at home, yet I have never ever witnessed a birth in my life. You would think (or at least, I would think) that my mother’s home births would have offered me the perfect opportunity to see a baby come into the world. But because the women in my family carried so much body shame—shame passed down from generation to generation—I’m sure the last thing my mother wanted was for everyone to see her bloody bits, even though for the longest time, all of us were female and used to seeing female bodies. (My first brother didn’t come along until December 15, 1963, on my seventh birthday.) But I never saw my siblings being born, so I can’t blame my later lack of interest in having children on the fear associated with watching a home birth.
In fact, I really wish I could get excited about the idea of a home birth. But if you were Black, poor, and living in the Deep South in the 1950s and ‘60s, you wouldn’t go to a hospital to have a baby, and you also wouldn’t make a conscious decision to give birth at home. You would just give birth once your body was ready. As they say on the GEICO Auto Insurance commercials, “It’s what you do.” Having children at home was what my mother seemed to do without imagining it could be otherwise.
That doesn’t mean having babies came naturally to my mother, at least not at first. My mother once told me that my older sister—my mother and father’s first child—was born after they had been married for six years. Waiting six years to conceive certainly wasn’t a conscious decision on their part. My mother just couldn’t seem to get pregnant, that’s all, and nobody knew why. I was told later that several well-meaning relatives would say to her things like, “Now, the Bible says, ‘Be fruitful and multiply!’” This wouldn’t be the first or last time that I heard someone in my presence quote a Bible verse out of context. My relatives would also throw out meaningless platitudes, like, “The Bible says that children are a blessing.”
I personally think that orgasms are a blessing, but that’s just me.
When I was a fundamentalist Christian for the first two decades of my life, I assumed I’d have children just because that’s what all women around me did. Then again, I also assumed I’d marry a preacher, or just get married, period. In fact, during my fundamentalist Christian days, and even a few years afterwards, I wanted to get married because it would prove to the world that somebody wanted me, a feeling I experienced so rarely. But I gradually began to realize that I didn’t want children. My dysfunctional, chaotic, and violent family certainly had a hand in that thinking.
My thinking wasn’t commonplace. It was rare for me to meet or hear about other women who didn’t want children. Women like that would be considered pariahs, and everyone who found out I wanted to remain childless would be like, “What’s wrong with you?” I suppose that my choice not to have children, however, became another possible reason for feeling like I didn’t belong.
When I was in high school, I would frequently check out a particular book from the library. It was called, How to Get a Teen-Age Boy and What to do with Him When You Get Him, by the late Ellen Peck. The book did no good. But I mention the author because I remember that she was also an advocate for childfree living who founded the National Organization for Non-Parents (NON)*.
As a teenager, I remember being fascinated by the idea of a woman choosing not to have children. It certainly wasn’t a popular opinion (“Oh, you’ll change your mind!” or “You’re so selfish!” people would later say), but it was a stance that I thought took an awful lot of courage. My 14-year-old self couldn’t really appreciate this at the time. But looking back, I can see what a revolutionary act it was for a woman to admit that she didn’t want children. I admire people who know what they want and aren’t afraid to say so, even if sticking out of the crowd can feel lonely sometimes.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, a friend of mine was in her thirties when she told me that she had gotten her tubes tied at age 19. She said she always knew that she didn’t want children. Of course, she had a heck of a time finding a doctor who would perform the procedure on someone so young. She’s in her sixties now, and she said she has never regretted her decision. I thought about my friend’s commitment to herself, and in 1995, I finally made the decision to get my tubes tied. That’s when I got a firsthand look at society’s attitudes about childbearing. I can’t believe the grief the surgeon gave me for making that decision.
Here I was, in my late thirties, and the doctor was asking me things like, “Well, how do you know you’re making the right decision? How do you know you won’t change your mind later? How do you know…?”
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Look!” I said, “Are you going to do the surgery or not?”
“Oh, I’ll still do it,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure you were aware of everything that was involved. That’s all.”
Sigh.
It’s amazing that a man, even if he is a doctor, would have any idea what it’s like to think about having children—and how to know exactly what you want to do with your body, that is, to be clear you don’t want to grow any kids inside it. What’s more, it’s audacious for a male doctor to assume that he has any kind of say over what I do with my body.
For the most part, I don’t regret my decision not to have kids. I certainly have more freedom to pursue my interests without children in my life. But, occasionally I wonder if I’m missing out on something. I’ll have these brief, fleeting moments where I don’t feel like I’m fully female because I’ve never experienced motherhood. Plus, it feels a little weird knowing that classmates my age are now parents and grandparents. During those times, I’ll sometimes wonder what it would feel like to give birth. Of course, I’ll never know. I guess I’m still too busy trying to give birth to my newly-diagnosed autistic self in this world, to want an extra life to worry about.
*The National Organization for Non-Parents (NON) was founded in 1972 by Ellen Peck and Shirley Radl. NON designated August 1st as Non-Parents Day and it later became International Childfree Day. NON later changed its name to the National Alliance for Optional Parenthood, but it does not appear to have lasted beyond the 1980s.
Gloria Jackson-Nefertiti (she/her/hers) is a Black, cisgender, femme elder who is late-diagnosed autistic. She’s hard at work on her memoir, “A Different Drum,” and lives in Seattle, Washington.