By Ellyn Ruthstrom
I’ve heard so many women in my life say something like, “The one thing I always knew I wanted to be is a mother.” And I could say pretty much the same thing from the opposite perspective: I’ve always known I didn’t want to be a mother. But if I ever said that to someone when I was still of childbearing age, I was often told that I would change my mind. Or, even more invasively, “You are going to regret it.”
No. And no.
I remember as a young teen feminist reading many books about the oppression of women and how it was linked to the fact that women bear and raise the children, and not until the responsibility of raising children was more equally shared by men would the status of women change. I could never envision myself as wanting to devote my time to raising children—it just seemed boring to me. I didn’t want to spend my time teaching a child to speak and then a few years later teaching them how to be quiet and how to behave. I really didn’t want to live with all the plastic that appears to dominate American childhoods and, most of all, I did not want to be forced to watch Disney and Pixar movies over and over again.
One of my earliest commitments to myself as a feminist was that I would never change my last name. The whole idea that a woman’s identity was malleable and determined by the male figures in her life (father and then husband) really pissed me off. Also, that men got to feel the permanence of their name and take pride in their family’s heritage, passing it from generation to generation. It didn’t seem fair. I also said to myself that if any babies ever came out of my body, their last name would also be Ruthstrom, no matter who the father was. That’s what I decided for myself by the age of 14.
I also didn’t see myself as wanting to get married, but at 20 I fell madly in love with an Englishman. When I was 25, we married so that I could live there, and eventually he could live in the U.S. with me. I kept my name, as planned, which didn’t go down well with the in-laws, but I had that whole American thing as a strike against me anyway. There were no plans to have children and I only found out at the end of our 10-year relationship that he kind of wished I had gotten pregnant along the way. That shocked me because when we had spoken about it earlier, we had been on the same page.
The fear of pregnancy was omnipresent during my years of being sexually active with men. Even if I was vigilant with my birth control, there was always the reality that my life could be altered at the drop of a sperm. I experienced the horror of late periods, but I count myself very lucky that I never had to scrounge together the money for an abortion, like other friends of mine had to. I also know that an abortion was always the choice I would have made.
In my twenties, I was still hanging out in Straightsville and that was when a lot of my straight friends were starting to have children. But after I came out as bi and my community was the queer world, the majority of my new friends were not having children, so there was no social pressure to do so. My mother died when I was young and my dad never said anything to me about whether I would have children or not. He was wonderful that way.
Having relationships with women was my favorite birth control method. No prescriptions necessary. And, for a long time, I fell for other women who didn’t want to have kids. Worked out great. Until I ended up in a relationship with a younger woman who did want to have children. We were together for a few years, and I knew it wasn’t going to last because of her desire to be a mom. When 9/11 happened, it really shook a lot of people up, pushing them to clarify what they truly wanted in life. I tried to imagine myself being a parent in order for us to make a go of it, but in the end, it just didn’t feel true to me, and we parted ways after a long goodbye. She now has two beautiful kids and is also parenting her sister’s child, so it is wonderful to know that she got what she desired.
One of the things that I have noticed, and bemoaned with other childfree queer women, is the way our birth families sometimes devalued what our nontraditional lives look like. I have two siblings who both have children, and for many years while their kids were young, it was always most important to work around their family calendars when scheduling gatherings, and I was just assumed to fit into whatever plan was made. I couldn’t possibly have anything more important that could interfere. Yet I was the one who was politically engaged and devoting my time to different community campaigns and activities. You know, trying to make the world a better place for future generations. That kind of thing.
Another thing that can be different for a queer woman’s life pattern if she doesn’t choose to have children is being a serial monogamist. Children are still often a common reason for people to stay together, sometimes longer than they would if they did not have children. I’ve had several long-term relationships in my life (and some splendid short ones as well!) that have been really fulfilling and brought so much into my life. But I’ve sometimes felt a reaction from some of my straight friends with a lack of understanding of me choosing to move on from a relationship and even sometimes pitying me for being single in between the relationships. No pity is necessary over here. I value those times in between the relationships for many reasons and feel good about being an independent soul who knows when a relationship has run its course for both people.
In my late 50s, I fell in love with a woman who had been in a 20-year straight marriage and has three kids. How does that happen? They weren’t little ones—she never would have left the marriage when they were young and I wouldn’t have wanted to help raise children, so the timing worked out. I am not a parental figure to them, but we are family. It has definitely been the most complicated part of our relationship, figuring out the balance of priorities between being partners and her being a mother. She is used to making all sorts of accommodations for other people’s needs and I do not always understand the level of sacrifice she believes is necessary. Still, we work on that and it’s a learning experience for both of us.
It’s been a long journey and I have no regrets about my non-procreation path. My teen feminist self is still very much within me, and I continue to fight for other women to make the nontraditional and unpopular choice of being childfree.
Ellyn Ruthstrom is a childfree cat woman who is on the board of directors of Bi Women Quarterly. She hosts the annual BBWN Brunch and Book Swapnear Boston, Massachusetts.