By Heidi Bruins Green
I always knew that I would have children. Everyone knew it. I was the one with tender bedtime rituals for all my dolls. I took in dolls no one wanted anymore. My arms reached to hold any baby within my radius. Once when we were young, someone handed a baby to my older sister while simultaneously saying, “Oh, I think her diaper is dirty.” My sister instinctively let her arms go limp. Baby Anita would have fallen except I was right there underneath my taller sister with my arms extended.
How then did I end up deciding NOT to have children?
It was a series of small choices that each made sense when I made them.
Wait until after grad school.
Wait until I have a partner who wants children.
Wait until I’m settled in a job with good benefits.
Come to understand that my now-wife actually DOESN’T want children.
Choose that relationship over hypothetical children and grieve my empty arms.
After the devastating ending of that relationship when I was 40, realizing that I could choose again.
Recognize that children no longer fit into the life I had built and was right for me.
Grieve again.
Those choices and myriad other choices have given me the life I have today.
I love my life. I’m married to a man I love, respect, and adore spending time with. We’re good together in a way my wife and I never were. When we got together, he already had children, who I met when they were 12 and 16. They are 35 and 39 now. I love them fiercely.
I have a brother whose faith path led him to decide I couldn’t be around his children because my capacity to love people of all sexes made him uncomfortable. Over time he and his wife have matured beyond their either/or thinking. They now welcome me, but long after the children had grown; I never got to dote on them during the bonding years as babies and small children.
Then I realized that kids of kids could be an answer. The next generation!
I had hoped for grandchildren to spoil, but neither of my stepkids want to bring children into the world we have. (Grandpets are nice, but not the same.)
More grieving.
I hoped for an opportunity to be in the lives of great nephews and nieces, but distance and ideological differences have forced more losses.
On the upside, I’ve never faced stigma, or even overt disapproval, for not having children. I’m sure I’ve not been included in lunches or friendship circles that were parenthood-based. I know I made major faux pas when I was younger by giving “parenting advice” to friends with children. I have always been treated kindly when I’ve made those cringe-worthy comments.
My age group is dealing more often with aging parents—where we are suddenly the children again—so we are back on even footing. I can commiserate and ask good questions based on what I’ve learned and have experienced firsthand.
When I look back on my life and look at the people around me, I see that I’ve been lucky. While in my deepest fantasies, I imagine that I had children—I know that I idealize them, gloss over growing-up challenges, and have a rosy picture of what our relationship would be like now—the reality might have been very different. I have a friend who adopted two young girls and the intervening years have been little but heartbreak. Another dear friend has two children—one developed a life-altering mental illness that keeps him from the dreams he once had, and the other has cut her mother off completely. I’ve learned that having children is not a guarantee of happiness or even of support in your old age.
Being childless has allowed me to explore who I am, get plenty of sleep, stay out all night on a beach in Portugal, live on a Greek island for weeks, make reckless choices, and deal with the consequences on my own terms. On the other hand, I wasn’t there for first steps, first words, to kiss a boo-boo, or to be the only arms some small being could be comforted by.
There are trade-offs as with everything in life. I have the feeling there isn’t a “right” choice about parenting, there is just getting comfortable with your choice and living your life. This is mine.
Heidi Bruins Green lives in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. A bi+ and anti-racist activist and educator beginning in the ’80s and ’90s, she designs learning experiences and is flirting with retiring to spend more time with her husband, Jamison Green, and their cat, Squeak.