To Have or Have Not

“Somehow at 5, I was past childbearing age,” writes the poet Molly Peacock in her recent memoir, “Paradise, Piece by Piece.”

I know exactly what she means. At 13, I wrote in a class essay that I did not want to have children. If such a sentiment made me different from most girls, I didn’t care.

I grafted my adolescent sensibility onto Nancy Drew, that winning detective of girls fiction. I assumed that Nancy--content to solve mysteries, pal around with her girl friends and boss around her boyfriend--had no interest in having children.

But as my 30s clocked into my 40s, a decision that had been effortless and reversible began to seem eccentric and isolating. I knew there were other intentionally childless women, but they existed on some rarefied plane--the world inhabited by Katharine Hepburn and Gloria Steinem.

In my personal life, I knew almost no woman without children who wasn’t planning on children, going to extraordinary means to get children, or lamenting that she didn’t have any. My six college roommates have borne--or adopted--a total of 14 children. I became accustomed to going to school reunions and being the only childless one there.

I wasn’t embarrassed. I didn’t feel judged. The bonds with my closest friends were forged on a deep understanding of the things that bedeviled us--careers, men, family.

Still, I wondered how I could make a choice so different from the one made by women I knew so well, women I trusted and respected and loved.

More disturbing was that some of the intentionally childless women I knew were brooding neurotics or aging princesses. I feared that I mirrored the worst of them.

“You need to find a support group for women who don’t want to have children,” a longtime friend--a man who happens to be a psychiatrist--suggested several years ago.

In fact, I was always looking for those women, searching for a soul mate, wondering if I was an aberration or part of some small but significant sorority.

It turns out I am both. Women who decide not to have children are increasing in number. But the choice remains unusual. It seems to defy biology, sociology, even our love of baby animals. It sets women apart.

Despite the acceptance of women in nearly every vocation--prime minister, CEO, movie director, space shuttle commander--there remains in the eyes of society something odd, off-kilter, surprising about the woman who rejects motherhood.

“I think there is this feeling that you haven’t completed the circle as a woman if you don’t have children,” said author Susan Faludi. She finds herself, at 41, in a long-term relationship with a man and undecided about children, content for the moment to mother her two tabby cats, Hedda and Pogo.

Unlike a man, who has an almost lifelong option to father a child, a woman has a limited time to bear children. The path to that decision is as varied as the women who forge it.

As I began to approach the end of my own childbearing years, I looked for companions.

Mythology and Literary Images

Of course, there have always been childless women. Mythology depicts them as goddesses or witches. Television and movies render them as crotchety spinsters or workaholics or women pining to become wives and mothers. In 18th and 19th century literature, women characters--like their real-life counterparts--had little control over their maternal fates.

If they were young and childless, they presumed they would become wives and mothers. Otherwise, they were generally governesses, prostitutes or nuns.

While the cultural images of childless women may stagnate, the statistics have been changing. Childlessness among women ages 40 to 44, the years deemed the end of the fertility spectrum by the U.S. Census Bureau, has climbed from 10% in 1980 to 19% in 1998.

Part of the increase in childlessness is because women have the power to make a choice. Oral contraceptives have been available since 1960, and abortion has been legal since 1973.

“More and more women are getting educated and postponing their marriages and childbearing and probably finding satisfaction in their jobs rather than having babies,” said U.S. Census Bureau demographer Amara Bachu, who has tracked fertility statistics for 20 years.

Bachu, herself, chose not to have children. “I always thought I could not give full attention to having kids and doing this work,” she said.

Eight years ago, I interviewed Sherry Lansing, now the chairwoman and CEO of Paramount’s Motion Picture Group. At the time, she was an independent film producer--and had spent several years as president of production at 20th Century Fox. Then 48, she had not only navigated her way around the land mines of Hollywood but, I suddenly realized, she had also sailed through the years without bearing children. Was that deliberate?

“I sort of believe that you can have it all, but it’s extremely difficult,” she said. “If you get two out of the three and stop trying to be a superwoman, you’re usually much more relaxed. I think if you have a career and you have a marriage and you have children and you try and be a 10 in all the areas, you may have a nervous breakdown.”

I know that Lansing was and remains a devoted stepmother to her husband’s son, Jack, who has lived with them part of the time. Yet in that one conversation, she had renovated the fairy tale for me, living happily ever after with a husband and a dream job, but without having full-time responsibility as a mother. Here was a role model, confirmation that women made this choice and led, well, womanly lives. It wasn’t just her choice that was striking--it was her comfort with it.

But years after talking to Lansing, decades after my eighth-grade homework assignment, I found myself suddenly reevaluating a decision I thought I had made easily and firmly. I needed to meet women who had made similar decisions. I wanted to measure my own choice against theirs. I wanted validation.

Fitting the Profile

To the extent that a profile of the voluntarily childless woman exists, sociologists have identified it as this: firstborn or only child, well-educated, urban dweller, not very religious.

I fit all those categories. There is another one. Some women were conscripted into caring for younger children--and grew up not wanting to do it again. Constance Penley is one example.

Penley, the eldest of four, helped raise her younger brothers and a sister. Observing her parents’ lives, she saw child-rearing as the trap that would keep her in rural Florida. Going to school--far away--was her escape. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley and embarked on an academic career of teaching, writing and traveling.

Penley, twice married and divorced, stayed childless.

“I never made a decision one way or another, but it’s absolutely clear that every single decision I made--about what work I did, where I lived--every single decision I made was away from having kids,” said Penley, chairwoman of the film studies department at UC Santa Barbara.

“A friend of mine who doesn’t have children says, ‘I experience childlessness as joy in my life,’ ” Penley said, marveling at the phrase. “We’re not allowed to say that.”

Hearing Penley comforted me. She had few regrets. An unintentional pregnancy, which she aborted, had not made her reconsider children. Menopause came and went without trauma. She was exhilarated by her research and loved the freedom of working day or night in the top-floor study of her art-filled townhouse. Her friends were either childless or the parents of grown children. I loved how she was content to live her life unfettered by either children or a significant other.

In one of her courses, she eviscerates myths of modern romance in literature and the movies. Although a cult favorite, the course turns out some crestfallen students who write evaluations lamenting Professor Penley’s attacks on conventional notions of everlasting love and marriage. She loves that.

Her looks and her unorthodox views prompt students to play guessing games about her sexual orientation. “I’m embarrassingly vanilla heterosexual,” she confessed. But she cultivates inscrutability--no jewelry, bitten fingernails and bleached blond spiky hair that gives her, even at 52, a pixieish look.

I admired her serenity and clarity, even if she was fuzzy on the route there. For instance, in her two marriages, the topic of children--do we want them and how many? --was never discussed beforehand. Her first husband did want children, but the marriage ended first. In her second marriage--to Andrew Ross, director of the American Studies program at New York University--she said the possibility of children did not come up before they separated and then divorced.

Our life choices seemed similar. But while she was secure in her choice to be without children, I was brooding over mine.

A Haphazard Decision

I’ve never been married. But as I talked to childless women who had married, I realized that the decision not to have children was often as haphazard as the decision to have them.

I could see that in the lives of Helen and John Bates.

Helen, 41, never had what she calls an instinct for children. Korean-born, she has shrugged off a cultural upbringing that expects all women to produce children. She laughed and rolled her eyes when she recounted her brother suggesting that she have children to keep her husband. “My husband will leave me if I do have children,” she said.

A tennis coach at Rio Hondo College in Whittier who once played competitively, Helen met John, also a tennis professional, in the mid-’80s. John, then in his mid-30s, wasn’t even sure he would get married, let alone have a family.

Yet they can’t agree on when they started discussing children. Each had told me separately that he or she would have agreed to a child if the other had insisted on it.

“Maybe you two need to talk,” I said only half-joking when I related how each seemed to think the other was more adamant about not having children.

“It wasn’t like we discussed this before marriage,” recalled John, 47, a tennis pro at Friendly Hills Country Club in Whittier. “I don’t think we were at a stage where both of us said, ‘Definitely not, no way’ until after we were married five or six years. I think then we kind of said, ‘Well, we really don’t want any and probably never will.’ ”

Before a recent move, they lived with their two dogs in a Spanish-style house in Whittier. Their home reflected their affection for each other from nearly every corner. At one end of their bedroom was a Jacuzzi with John’s photographic portrait of Helen hanging over it. On another wall was a framed drawing, commemorating their 1987 marriage with the declaration, “Both Winners in a Love Match!” They love their time together, uninterrupted by children.

Lean, attractive and well-spoken, they hear as many people confiding envy of their lifestyle as those exhorting them to have children. Indeed, there are youngsters in their lives--students, nephews, aspiring tennis players who live weeks at a time with the couple.

They both have pangs when they see little children. But they say they can live with a little wistfulness. How could you love someone and not be at least a little curious about what your children might look like? “It would be so nice to see a little child who looks like John,” said Helen.

But an emotional fillip is not a basis for parenthood, Helen said. “We both felt like we should really, really want them if we were going to have them.”

When I first talked to Helen and John, I thought maybe they had made a tragic gift-of-the-Magi mistake: Was each sacrificing the desire for a child based on what one thought the other wanted? But as I reflected on my conversation with them, my view changed. A life together without children became clear only as their marriage progressed.

Instead of being alarmed by their musings about children, I found it refreshing, even reassuring. Just because you have moments of wistfulness over the life not chosen doesn’t mean you have made a mistake.

Loathing the Idea of Pity

Whether or not you decide to have children, no one ever wants to say it was a mistake. If you have them and say that, you’re evil. If you choose not to have them and say that, you’re pathetic.

I loathed the idea that people would pity me. I hated the fact that I cared. But that is what happens when a decision takes you outside the mainstream.

I wasn’t the only one caught in this carousel of angst. Social worker Carolyn Morell, childless and 58, seemed to share my sentiments in her book, “Unwomanly Conduct, the Challenges of Intentional Childlessness.”

She writes, “For me, being childless requires a measure of courage. . . .” At the least, being childless requires a measure of freedom from society’s expectation.

Despite my last-minute mulling, it had never occurred to me that I couldn’t choose that option.

I had never had any free-standing baby lust. I never cooed over people’s pictures of their babies. I never fantasized about playing games with my future children. I didn’t like organized play when I was a child. In fact, I didn’t particularly like being a child. When I was growing up in Chicago, I was always happier sitting in the living room, listening to my parents and their friends, their fast-paced conversations and their laughter. I hated being banished to the family room to play board games with kids my own age.

As an adult, my maternal feelings were showered on the cat I had for 18 years, from the time he was a kitten until the morning he died on my bedroom floor.

Childless women want to distance themselves from the image of the cat lady. Of course, I know the difference between pets and children. But I also took my cat, Arnold, along on plane trips, curled up at night with him in front of the TV, and nursed him through kidney failure.

I admit that I thought of myself as mothering him, and, in some ways, I was least selfish when caring for him. I also know he was all the maternal responsibility I wanted.

I worship several romantic ideals--most notably, love with passion and thinness without hunger. Never have I had any romantic notions about child rearing. Apparently, I am not alone. The voluntarily childless, writes sociologist Jean Veevers, “tended to define parenthood as martyrdom, and to construe a choice between personal sacrifice or self-actualization.”

That was perhaps the one unifying view shared by every woman I had interviewed.

“Having kids in our society is a lonely suburban experience,” said Judith Shapiro, the 58-year-old president of Barnard College in New York, who is childless. Contrast that with the Brazilian forest where Shapiro did anthropological field work. There, the village really did raise a child. She often found herself toting around a child. In the United States, most women are left to bear the daily responsibilities of child-raising.

Many childless women say they would prefer to be aunts, stepmothers, or, if it were possible, hold the traditional father role--working a rewarding job all day and tucking in the kids at night.

I am already an aunt. Despite my aversion to games, I am happy to play with my 2-year-old nephew or cuddle my infant niece--but I know that at the end of the day or the weekend, I get in my car and go home, leaving the day-to-day task of raising them to their parents.

“The interesting thing is I know I would have been a great mother--but I wouldn’t have been a happy mother,” said Jean Dickinson, 40, a senior account supervisor with the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton in Los Angeles.

Dickinson and I are both what sociologists call “early articulators”--as opposed to postponers--deciding early in our lives we didn’t want children. “I don’t like to hold babies,” she said. “I don’t think that baby smell is anything to get excited about.”

We share a fear of turning frumpy during pregnancy and staying that way after giving birth. “I see it at work,” she said. “I know women who are pretty darn attractive, then the next thing you see, they have really bad haircuts, no sleep and food on their clothes.”

Dickinson knows child rearing is more than dealing with a bloated body. Her concerns, though, are not frivolous. Society seems to gloss over the magnitude of the physical changes of pregnancy and the near-violent events of childbirth.

Annalee Newitz always disliked the idea of her body as “a vessel.” So she had herself sterilized--at age 28.

“That’s sick,” a male friend blurted out when I told him about Newitz, who has a PhD in English from UC Berkeley and is an editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

“Yes, I’m a freak of culture. I did spend a lot of time thinking about [being sterilized]. It wasn’t like I thought, ‘Oh, you know what would be cool?’ like a body piercing.”

Newitz, now 31, had been saying since junior high in Irvine that she didn’t want children. “A lot of the mothers seemed angry and bitter,” she said.

People told her she was making a mistake that she would later regret. “I have friends my age who are having kids, and they are competent to make a decision that will impact them for their whole lives,” she said. “No one says to you, if you decided to have a kid, ‘Well, how are you going to feel in 10 years?’ ”

She shares a three-story house in the Sunset district of San Francisco with four friends-- including her ex-boyfriend--and two cats.

“If I was raised in a culture where raising children was considered a job and men were willing to do it, and people lived communally like in this house, I’d probably be OK with having kids,” she said.

I had gone to see Newitz because I was fascinated by someone so sure of their decision at such a young age. We bonded over cats and our shared sense that the burden of child rearing fell unfairly to women. But I didn’t share her feelings about wanting to rid her body of its role as a vessel. To me, the ability to get pregnant represents youthfulness, a certain power--even if I never availed myself of it.

Visiting a Best Friend

After leaving Newitz’s house, I visited my best friend from high school. Paula McShane lives with her husband--a computer expert and master juggler--and two sons, 10 and 12, in a rambling old San Francisco house. We hadn’t seen each other for a few years, and she fussed over me, introducing me to her sons, pulling out the crystal champagne glasses.

In the years I have known her, as she moved from a first husband to a second, from Chicago to California, she has only talked about possible careers--interior design and architecture are the ones I remember. I had felt bad for her and a little perturbed that as smart and creative and funny as she was, she had never found engaging work.

But as we sat on her patio, eating dinner while the sun set, listening to her boys talk about school and juggling, I was moved by how connected she was to them. They are smart and interesting, and she was, too, in how she dealt with them. They called her by her first name, and as she listened to them and laughed at their stories, she managed to treat them with respect, camaraderie and motherly concern. That night I flew home, as profoundly dazzled by her family--marked with the stamp of her quirky personality--as I would have been by any building she might have designed.

What an odd day, I thought--to go from the home of a woman determined never to have children to the home of a woman who had devoted her life to her children. Yet both of them seemed so comfortable in their choices.

So did all the women I interviewed. No one seemed to be fretting or taking a last-minute inventory like I was: Will I envy my friends when they proudly trot off to their children’s college graduations? Will I be lonely when I’m old because I have no children? Have I slept through my biological clock--only to awaken at 55 wanting to have a child?

But here’s the revelation. Everything about my life led me to this point where I am 44 and without children: the career changes I made when others were settling down; the move away from Washington, D.C.--and the best boyfriend I ever had--in my prime childbearing years.

All my life I had been sure I did not want to have children. Then, as I reached 40, I sensed a slight but alarming change. I fell so in love with a man who intensely wanted children that I told myself I could have one. Just one. No internal revelation has shocked me more.

That relationship faded, but suddenly babies seemed cuter. A friend brought her 8-month-old daughter to the office, and I couldn’t put her down. Once the person who suffered politely through other people’s baby pictures, I came to work armed with snapshots of my newborn niece.

None of this made me run out to a sperm bank. But it did remind me I was up against a biological last call.

Even if in your mind and your heart, you know you don’t want children, you know that you don’t want a life of feeding, clothing and tending, when your life is instead defined by your desires, your work, the joy of controlling each of your days, the savoring of each moment, the smell of eucalyptus trees as you drive by, the knowledge you can dawdle at night to stare at the stars--even if you know all that, there is still some sadness, some grief over deciding never to bear children.

But, like Helen and John Bates seeing a child on the street and then conjuring up the one that might have been, you let that imaginary child go.