Women Cannot Be Persuaded to Have Children
The decision to create life, if given the opportunity to choose, is not necessarily rational but deeply personal, sometimes impulsive, always affecting.
No one can persuade a woman to bear children because the creation of life is not a thing privy to persuasion.
Trying to convince a woman to subject her body to visceral transformation, beckoning a lifetime of permanent consequence and selfless responsibility, is like asking the sky to live forever in October; it simply cannot be done.
The pressure to succumb to or rebel against misguided cultural expectations about what it means to be a woman is relentlessly stifling. Are we considered whole until we have ripened fruit within us?
My country begs women for babies like their bodies are currency, and then discards the mothers as soon as their wombs are emptied (or perhaps they are grotesquely used as incubators). Motherhood in the United States is a public policy afterthought. Both the childless and the childrearing women here are decorated in similar scars in different shapes from the same weapons and still, we keep on living. We must be so collectively terrifying in our refuse of the intangible echoes of lingering patriarchal chorales.
I did not choose to have children to satisfy the peculiar commandment of some abstract societal body. My child is not for random others, and my decisions about making my child or bearing my child or raising my child or frankly anything that may or may not involve my child are never made because of random others.
When my husband and I decided we wanted to have children, it was because some unseen neuron zapped my central nervous system one afternoon and I found the words “Maybe we should make a baby today!” spilling out of my mouth. This proposition was not birthed from a long-held desire for motherhood. It was irrational. There was no baby fever making me heartsick. There was no prior longing for a life I could not yet understand. There was only an idea, a sudden feeling, an ember of something twinkly and orange that happened to be flickering in the glow of July that captured my periphery.
I did not give life to my daughter just to tell her that her purpose is to make a daughter of her own. I gave life to my daughter because somewhere deep inside my soul, I simply wanted to.
Mothers and babies are not for sale.
My government, a public entity who cannot give birth and does not have a reproductive system, wants more babies. I want my government to stop being so creepy.
I read headlines these days that propose a “baby bonus” like my daughter is for sale. Like my womb is for sale. Like she and I are commodities for the economy. Like our essence can be bought and traded and sold and bartered.
We do not have a price; but the price will become your life if you take another step closer to my child or my uterus with a barking claim to either.
I do not want a baby bonus, but I can think of a few things that would be nice:
A hospital birth that does not cost $40,000 without health insurance. Health insurance that does not charge a newborn with a deductible for being born. Mental health professionals that work in connection with endocrinologists in the postpartum period. Paid leave for working mothers and paid leave for supporting partners. A framework for affordable childcare.
Mothers are not for sale, and neither are our children.
Mothers are whole. Children are whole.
I feel, to some extent, that I am flourishing in motherhood. I feel like I was made for this. I was certainly made for my daughter. But I was also made for a thousand other things.
As a mother now, I am called to center my child. My life must revolve around her for her survival. One day, she will discover her own joy, her own dreams, her own favorite ice cream flavor. She may prefer the beach over the forest, books over movies, sour candy over chocolate. She will make her own orbit, and gravity will always keep me circling her, but I will still spin in my own right.
This is the life I chose. It is a sublime satisfaction to give my daughter the best life I can while I live my own in all of its infinite iterations. I only discovered this special kind of euphoric freedom after I became a mother, but it is not the same for everyone. It is something that is impossible to feel until you have reached the other side, and it is entirely individualized.
No one can convince a woman to yearn to feel something unknowable that they must abandon their present life to uncover. It is the ultimate risk with the highest reward.
Women who do not have children are still whole. Women who have children are also still whole regardless of their children.
Children do not make a woman whole. Children are whole people themselves.
I was never convinced to have children. I did not fall victim to diabolical lies, and then change my mind. My decisions about my dreams and my womb are ever-changing, are mine to make, and have nothing to do with the world outside the four corners of my home.
I first became pregnant at 31. Before that, I remember how it felt to be asked about my womb instead of my dreams. I remember being considered frivolous for existing in a wanderlust bubble-scape of adventure and transiency before motherhood; I was told that I did not know “tired” because I had not yet chosen to become a vessel. As if none of the trials and tribulations I faced and overcame before childbearing meant anything at all.
I remember my accomplishments — in academia — being reduced to checkboxes that I would blot black before my real life would begin.
I regret nothing about the person I was before I was a mother. Because I was myself. And I am still her, in different skin. I am more than one thing. And I hope that if you are a person who does not have children, or who does not want to have children, or cannot have children, that you can block out the noise and ignore the squawking voices of those who don’t even know your name.
To those who never become mothers, I care very much about your stories, your goals, your spontaneous dinner dates with friends and late nights in new cities that become second homes. And I hope you will still want to read the stories of mothers, too. Not the baby books and the parenting guides, but the stories about the mother as a whole person, as a character of literary merit and not a tropey trap you’re trying to avoid in the real world.
I want to come to your art shows and your open mic nights. I want to come to your graduations. I want to sit on the couch with you and gab about nothing in particular. I want to show up for the things that matter to you.
I was there once, in all of those places, hoping I was not forgotten in a sea of baby showers and weddings apparently most worthy of pomp and circumstance.
I still care about the women without children as much as I’m now leaning on the women with children who can guide me through this wild new identity I’ve embodied.
We need each other. We are not parts of each other we wish we were or weren’t. We are whole, living on this planet together, writing and reading and learning about the human condition in all its forms.
Some of us are mothers. Some of us are not.
I will celebrate your wholeness regardless.
💌
Xo,
Violet Carol
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Loved reading this!
There's truth here for sure... one of my most recent articles came out with a title (chosen by the editor) that included the word "pronatal," and I felt kind of weird about that. Like, I don't necessarily align with that movement?? It's interesting how motherhood gets talked about in the larger public square.
wonderful and thoughtful, as always. It behooves me to hear about US politicians' disrespect for women. Behooves me. Your Canadian sisters and holding American mamas with love and care and support even when your systems do not.
When I started being able to step away from my baby, I realized how valuable my non-mama friends were. SO VALUABLE!!!! They recharge me like nothing else. There truly is beauty and necessity in gathering as women of all stages and ages.