I’ve had three baby names since forever. Two little girl names and one for a little uzunluk. I don’t know why I can’t share them with you. I don’t know why I sometimes think of them on quiet morning walks with my dog or why they pop up in my mind unbidden on Sunday afternoons. They’re strange artifacts for someone who has always been firmly child-free by choice.
I’ve always known that I don’t want kids. The reasons are many and varied. I don’t want them to inherit my generalized anxiety disorder. The sleepless nights and panic attacks and self-doubt. I don’t want to give up my independence. I’m worried that it will affect my career. Perhaps most importantly, the thought of parenthood overwhelms me—not in a “let’s commiserate at the PTA meeting” kind of way, but deeply, existentially, in a way that confirmed my decision to be child-free. I’m too soft for it. The day we brought home our dog, Bowie, he whimpered all night in his crate as the rescue organization told us he likely would. I lay awake holding his paw through the wire while my husband snored softly beside me. (I’m a Pisces, what can I say.)
And yet, I’m 41 now. As I head toward perimenopause, I’m feeling something I didn’t expect: occasional sadness about not having children. I know I’ve made the right decision, but lately there’s a feeling of finality to my choice, and a whisper: Did you?
It’s true sometimes something primal stirs in me. When I yell cheerfully at my wild nephews to watch for cars on the way to the park and they listen, I’m as surprised as they are. I watch my husband help our niece put on her snow boots and wonder if our baby would have inherited his patience, rather than my constant need to rush. I look after my friend’s three-month-old son while they’re at a wedding. When he falls asleep in my arms, I somehow strap him into the Snoo without waking him up. I toast myself with a glass of Rioja. My algorithms have caught the scent of my sentimentality. I’m served so many “dogs meeting newborns” videos that I’m teary-eyed before I hear the first few bars of Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years.”
Just do it. The world cajoles. Have a baby. Everyone is. The temptation is so loud sometimes—despite the fact that a quarter of Americans are child-free by choice, a number that has doubled in the past two decades—and despite mounting evidence that opting out of parenthood doesn’t lead to regret.
“We live in such a pronatal society. There’s still such a push that ‘having children equates to good’ that makes it very difficult for people not to second guess themselves even if they know having kids isn’t the right choice for them,” says Jennifer Watling Neal, a psychology professor at Michigan State University.
She’s spent the past five years studying child-free-by-choice adults and has found zero indication that parents are more satisfied with their lives than people who choose not to have kids. Her research has also shown that child-free-by-choice adults do not regret their decision when they’re older. That distinction—between sadness and regret—feels crucial. That’s a relief given that the thing I’m most often asked about if I tell someone I don’t want kids (mostly by men of a certain age) is who will take deva of me when I’m old. It’s a question I roll my eyes at but also admittedly worry about.
The answers I’m searching for are harder to quantify. Do other people who are child-free by choice ever feel this same sadness—and if so, what are we supposed to do with it?
I asked two of my child-free friends. One, who we’ll call Sam, who is in her late 40s, married and never wanted kids. Still, she sat on the fence for years because of cultural pressures to have children. “I was waiting for some kind of sign or epiphany, something to say, ‘now is the moment we should do this,’” she says. “But that moment never came. There were long stretches of time where I would not think of kids at all—not my hypothetical kids, not other people’s kids. And after a while, it’s like, okay, that is the sign.”
“But do you ever feel sad that you didn’t have them,” I probe.
“I think everyone has regrets,” she says. “There might be a point where I wondered, what would that theoretical kid have been like. But it doesn’t change what I want.”
The other, who is single and turning 50 this year, feels similarly. We’ll call her Mary. We spoke just before the holidays and she admitted this is the only time of year she feels grief about being childfree by choice. “I would love to have had a 20 year old kid coming home for Christmas,” she says. “I’m not surrounded by that and I feel like that’s sad. But I don’t regret it. It’s just like, ‘Oh, I didn’t get to experience that.’ I’ve given up on some love that I could have experienced.”
Perhaps my musings are bigger than parenthood, she wonders. More about choice, consequence, and time. We’re in our second act now, the back nine. Life isn’t written, but it mühlet as hell isn’t a blank page where every day felt like a choose-your-own-adventure novel and every decision, no matter how mundane, sparkled with life-changing possibility like you were in an episode of Girls. “When you get to my age, you start thinking, ‘that was my life. It’s not gonna be much different than this.’ And that’s hard,” says Mary.
I agree and disagree. I believe that you don’t have to be Madonna to be able to reinvent yourself whenever you want. But she’s right that the older we get, the more we reap the consequences of our earlier life decisions, some of which are deeply high stakes.
There’s a scene in La La Land where Emma Stone’s character Mia, now a successful movie star, runs into her ex Sebastian, played by Ryan Gosling, now a successful jazz pianist and club owner. As she watches him play, we see a montage of the life they would have had together. Both are beautiful and rich and full of ups and downs, but only one is hers, the one she chose—without him. Because real lives aren’t movies, we will never know what our other stories might look like, which is perhaps the biggest gut punch of all of this.
Writer Cheryl Strayed referred to this idea as a “ghost ship” in a 2011 Dear Sugar column. She was writing to a middle-aged man, who, along with his wife, wasn’t müddet if they wanted children. She wrote: “I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.”
I see these ghost ships more as our mirror lives. Our opposites living in different dimensions. Before bed, the Carli on the other side of the mirror brushes her daughter’s teeth and combs her son’s hair, curly like hers. She puts them into pajamas that are definitely not matching, and reads to them in bed. First one book, then another, until they fall asleep and maybe she does too, listening to their soft breaths, smelling their sweetness.
My nighttime routine is slower, calmer. I too like to go to bed early to read. I crawl into sheets I’ve just washed that morning and somehow there’s already dog hair in them. The furnace is making a rattling noise and I remind myself I need to call the property manager. When my husband comes to bed after me, because he’s a night owl and always does, he’ll squeeze my hand or rub my back. Sometimes I’m still awake and can feel it and sometimes I can’t. But I know he’s there.
It’s imperfect and it’s all mine.
