[NYTr] Married Without Children Is the Life for Her

Mon Oct 15 15:20:25 EDT 2007

Womens eNews - Oct 15, 2007
http://www.womensenews.org

Married Without Children Is the Life for Her

By Kristen Tsetsi - WeNews correspondent

(WOMENSENEWS)--When my father's birthday approaches I'm often
susceptible to the TV-commercial version of the parent-child
relationship. The sweetness of a child sleeping on her father's chest.
Sunlit mornings in the kitchen, mother and daughter sharing a bowl of
sugar-free cereal.

Studio lighting and child actors have this way of filtering out
reality, of dropping softened edges on parenthood to make it look
suspiciously appealing.

But they don't blot out my own, unmediated visions of parenthood, which
come with panicky sensations akin to miniature minefields exploding
under my ribs. Pregnancy. Crying. Potty-training. PTA meetings.

In my early 20s, with a low-paying job and a beer in the refrigerator,
a child was the last thing I wanted. Every month, I ran through the
same questions as I anxiously awaited my period. Were we careful?
(Yes.) But were we careful enough? (People get pregnant while being
careful.) Still. We were. We were careful.

My 20s remained child-free.

And I maintained my anxious vigil into my early 30s. My period draws
near and I cross my fingers.

It's not that my husband and I don't take precautions; we do. But we're
using traditional birth control; there's always the chance it'll
happen. Always the slight chance we'll become parents. Something we
would not welcome.

Even when I was much younger--a teenager--I was sure I didn't want
children.

Unusual Disinclination

"You'll change your mind," they--friends, and even mere
acquaintances--would say. (Funny they--the "they" who always seem to
have something to say--never say, "You'll change your mind," to girls
who say they desperately want children.) "Why don't you think you want
kids?" they'd ask, as if I weren't sure. Someone once even suggested
there must have been psychological trauma in my childhood, or a
strained relationship with my mother, to explain my apparently unusual
disinclination toward motherhood.

I viewed my lack of interest in motherhood the way many who want
children view their very pressing interest: It was what it was and with
little reason. The way some women desire children, I simply didn't.
Babies brought into work by new mothers didn't make me long for the day
I could go shopping for fuzzy blankets and tiny boots. Children
bouncing around on green lawns didn't encourage a second, hopeful look
that one day those children would be on my lawn.

My first husband was also skeptical. I told him before he proposed that
I didn't think parenthood was for me, but he'd asked me to marry him
anyway. "We don't need to have kids," he'd say.

Not much later, when he figured out I wasn't going to change my mind,
we divorced. Like most others, he believed I would come around. What
woman doesn't want to have kids, after all?

Baby Appeared in Dreams

Then, about a year ago--when my current husband and I were on our
second year--a baby appeared in one of my dreams.

It was a girl, and she wore a white, patterned onesie. Her head rested
on my shoulder and even now I remember the weight of her on my arm.
There is no way for me to know the love a mother feels for her child,
but that dream might have come close; it was one of the more intense
and unique experiences I've had.

It was sweet. It was nice.

And yet, it was just a dream. Ten seconds of warm baby feelings simply
weren't enough to sway me.

It was the inability of such a beautiful sensation to change my mind
that clinched it. I did not, nor would I ever, want children. Final
answer.

I later told my husband about the dream, shared the strange sensation
of being what I imagined was a mother and ended with emphasizing I
would very much hate to accidentally get pregnant.

Phone Calls to Doctor

Some weeks later I drove to his office to drop something off and he
told me he'd started making phone calls.

"What kind of phone calls?"

"Insurance company. Doctor's offices."

He was planning a vasectomy.

We'd discussed the possibility in our not-so-distant past, but a
vasectomy hadn't felt right to him before. He had few objections to not
having children; that wasn't the issue. Quite simply, his body was his
body. It did what it did. It was unnatural to have surgeons in there
messing around, changing things, making holes and slicing tubes.
Because I was equally unexcited about the thought of getting a tubal
ligation--greater risks and side-effects--I'd understood and hadn't
pressed him.

So I was stunned to find out he'd made calls and wasn't sure if I
should thank him, ask him if he was OK or tell him--out of
politeness--"Oh, you don't have to do that."

What I said was, "Oh. OK."

I thought about it on the drive home.

Standard birth control is tentative, shaky. Whether the pill, an
implant or a condom, there's always that small margin for error.

A vasectomy is (practically) foolproof. And permanent. Solid.

If he had a vasectomy, I would definitely--for real--not be a mother.
Not be a parent. Ever.

When I looked 10 years down Vasectomy Road, there were no kids playing
in it. Not even the hovering 'oops' child, which in the past had always
presented itself as a sort of roadblock in my life map.

Not a single second thought presented itself. I was so happy I could
have screamed.

[Kristen Tsetsi writes for a Connecticut newspaper and is the author of
"Homefront." Her website is at: http://www.kristentsetsi.com

For more information:

"Missing Daughters on an Indian Mother's Mind": -
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2672/

"Inability to Conceive Knocks Life Off Course": -
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2635/

"I Become a Mother of a Chinese-American Girl": -
"http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1691/"