How To Become a More Selfish Parent

It’s hard telling people you don’t want to have kids. They look at you suspicious, eyebrows arched up nearly into their hairlines. It feels impossible telling people I can imagine a life (just as beautiful, just as meaningful), in which I never had the kids that are currently fighting over who has to scrub the crusty dinner pots. And that in my current life I deeply enjoy, crave, and revel in the childless spaces I create. Suddenly, sharply, the suspicion turns to disgust.

What the hell is wrong with you? You don’t deserve to be a parent! I feel sorry for your kids. Do you know how many people try desperately to have children? You’re so ungrateful. How do you think your kids are going to feel if they ever read this? What would you say to them if they ever found out?

The other day I teared up because my 14-year-old and I stood back to back in front of the microwave and the reflection unambiguously showed they are now officially taller than me. The pancake in my throat, the hot tears welling, the rush of warmth, all telling me these babies are growing up which is the absolute worst best thing. They are lanky, smelly, awkward halflings, not quite grown-ups, but almost. They are learning to drive and getting raises at their part-time jobs for being good workers while trashing the entire kitchen at home every time they as much as make a sandwich. They slam doors and call each other names and then secretly whisper to us what we think their sibling would like for their upcoming birthday. Sometimes, looking at them and knowing the first one will be gone in two short years reminds me of one of the littles explaining to me years ago that something hurt like being smashed with a hammer and stuck in boiling water. Exactly that.

And yet, there are alternate universes, unknowable paths I could have taken and didn’t, other lives with other people in it. And in some, no children at all.

I’ve had children for sixteen years now. It became harder and harder to imagine myself not as a mother the longer I was one. Pregnancy and birth and nursing and keeping them alive felt animalistic. I was their food, their house, their protector. I was their everything and nothing has ever been or will ever be as all-consuming as those early years. When I came up for air much, much later, my sole focus shifted from keeping them alive to helping them thrive. The stress was less critical to their survival, more about constant attention and support, and, well, being in the car an entire lifetime’s worth of extracurricular events. When before I surrendered to a biological urge of gathering my baby chicks under my wings over and over, now I had a line of ducklings following me around, watching me, imitating me, sticking their grubby little hands under the bathroom door. Are you pooping, mom? Mom? Mom!!

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Many people never get to experience themselves as something other than parents while raising children. Then they wake up as if out of a coma, when the kids move out and suddenly realize they don’t know their partners, they don’t know themselves. But more and more of us are navigating a different space now, thanks to divorce. While sharing parenting time is difficult in many ways, it is good in one way — I get more than the occasional few hours to myself. Those short and infrequent breaks are barely enough to meet a friend, have a coffee by myself, take a walk. No, what I am talking about is a consistent break, long enough to take off the mom clothes and put them on the back shelf in my closet, long enough to remember who I was before and still am, the one that is buried under back to school forms and dentist appointments and what are we having for dinner?

We are told we can be everything at the same time. We cannot. At least I can’t. If I hear them listening to K-Pop through the thin walls past their bedtime, I don’t feel like doing anything other than rolling my eyes at my partner and fighting about who has to get up to tell them to knock it off. Maybe I can be me and also a mother, a girlfriend, a writer, a friend, a sister, but there is a hierarchy. There is no time and energy for everything and my default has always been mother since I’ve had kids. I didn’t realize it until I experienced split parenting time that allowed me to reclaim personal space, and mental space, and living space that isn’t cluttered with bulging backpacks and curling irons and permission slips.

When reading the news lately, about how billionaires don’t have mansions and yachts and private jets anymore, but actual personal spaceships, my many thoughts were eclipsed by this: My dream vacation! Going into space and just staying up there in silence and weightlessness by myself for like a month. It’s not necessarily that I want to escape my life, it’s just that I at least want to be able to say I don’t have enough space for myself while being a mom at the same time. If I can’t have a good long stretch of time where I can be self-involved, only worrying about my own needs, my own desires, and preferences and not having the smell of sweaty gym shoes permeate my entire living space, let me at least say it: I revel in the space when I do get it. I revel in that me that exists untethered from what I am to other people. The me stripped of roles and obligations and responsibilities.

That me enjoys my own company. And silence. Blessed fucking silence. And loud R-rated movies and explicit music. That me walks around naked and eats on the couch and reads for hours in the hammock and doesn’t pick up after herself and has sex sometimes twice a day. That me is a writer who won’t be interrupted five thousand times trying to slap together a mediocre essay because, yes, sure you can go to the mall, after your chores are done. Then turning back to the words finding I lost my train of thought.

I’m not saying divorce is good, but it was good for me. I’m not saying nobody can have it all and be everything they want to be, but I can’t. I need to create spaces for myself where I can be my own person without my children. And I need to say it out loud precisely because I am so afraid that this makes me a bad mother.

Saying that being a mother is not the end-all, be-all seems to invite rage and contempt. It makes me wonder: Who benefits from the societal idea that mothers are better the more self-sacrificing they are? I examine my guilt at the potential hurt this may cause my children if they ever read these words. Would they feel rejected? Unloved? But then I think of my own mother who told me once that I was the most important person in her life. It was crippling in every way.

The scary truth is I don’t know what parts of this will hurt or heal. What I do know is that more than anything I want my children to have the freedom to be exactly who they are.

So, what would I say to them if they ever found out, ever read these words?

You used to need me and that was healthy. You will need me less and less as you get older and that is healthy too. It’s not your job to make me feel needed or whole.

My world used to revolve around you when you were helpless and that was healthy. My world will revolve less and less around you as you grow more capable and independent and that is healthy too. You don’t have to fear what happens when you leave this nest. I’ll be fine and so will you.

You and I are different people. Your life choices don’t reflect positively or negatively on me. They’re yours to make and live with. You do not need to be a certain kind of person with a certain kind of job and a certain kind of family to please me. I am curious to watch you discover who you already are.

I love you more than anyone else. When I say I would be just as happy without children, I’m not saying I would be happy without you, now that I know you. I’m saying there is no one right way to live a life and I could have had a glorious, beautiful, happy life without having children. And so can you.

You don’t have to become a parent if you don’t want to. I will not pressure you, will not feel entitled to grandchildren, will not tell you that you’ll regret your choices.

If you do become a parent, be prepared for temporary but complete annihilation. Scratch that. Nothing will prepare you. I will be there to help if you want me to. Once you emerge bleary-eyed after months or years of tiny humans in every nook and cranny of your life, do everything in your power to get yourself back. You’re not bad for wanting to recover a sense of self, for needing to carve out space apart from parenting.

You’re not betraying your children by acknowledging that you are your own person. You are setting them free by not expecting them to fulfill you.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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