Person Not Parent

When I was a child, whenever my stubborn ways exasperated my mother, she would reprimand me with a warning: “Your rotten character will make you a terrible mother some day!”

As it turns out, her prophecy never came true. First of all, because I know myself. I know that, in spite of my flaws, I don’t have a rotten character. Secondly, through community work I discovered my ability for selfless love. Thirdly, unlike my mother who had kids for all the wrong reasons, I have chosen to remain childfree.

My uncle and aunt were the first childfree couple I knew, which in the 70s was considered revolutionary. They were among the first double-income-no-kids couples. They had a career, were educated, spoke several languages and lived in a luxury apartment in the center of Zurich. Every year they traveled the world and brought me exotic souvenirs: an Aztec bracelet, a batik sundress, a princess ring covered in precious stones. My mother, barely veiling the resentment in her voice, said they were both selfish people. To me, they became my first role models.

People assume that if you grow up in a large family, you will end up having a few kids of your own. I don’t think this is necessarily true. We were four children, which by today’s standards are considered a large family. My two younger brothers are stuck in the burbs with a spouse, mortgage and children but my older sister, who by the age of eight advocated a childfree adulthood, has fulfilled her vision. A businesswoman, she lives and works in Manhattan.

As for me, I never aspired to become a mother and a housewife. These roles are limiting and restrictive. There are so many more choices; so many things to express and explore. I have this one lifetime to do something worthwhile, so I feel there is more to life than being able to bake the perfect quiche or to bury my time under a pile of ironing. My intellectual needs are strong and biologically, I’ve never heard any clocks ticking in my head. What a silly myth anyway. It’s a feminist backlash, devised to discourage female competition in an ever-decreasing job market. I am disappointed that so many smart women are being brainwashed into believing that if they are single and/or childless, they have failed as human beings.

Truthfully, however, I guess that parenthood has never ranked high on my list of priorities. I just happened to have other goals such as study, travel and doing creative work. Quality of life is very important to me. Looking back now, I have no regrets because I know for certain that I wouldn’t have enjoyed my life as much, had I chosen to become a mom. I would be poorer for starters, and less educated. I wouldn’t have traveled and therefore, I wouldn’t have met and married my husband. I’d be stuck in the burbs with all the rest of the Jones’, going out to the pub on a Friday night to reclaim their freedom.

I refuse to buy into this whole public perception of what womanhood is all about. I’ve never believed, not for one second, that reproduction was the way to fulfill myself as a woman. If this theory were true, it would imply that we should all be living in perfect harmony. Thanks to the dutiful work carried out by all the fulfilled mothers of the world, every child would grow up to become a well-adjusted, loving and responsible adult. All psychotherapy, rehabilitation centers and prisons, would therefore become obsolete and be shut down. Alas, we all know it isn’t so. There are plenty of abandoned, abused kids everywhere. We probably all know at least one of them. The truth is that the world is becoming increasingly dangerous for all of us, but for children, in particular.

Things were seriously wrong back in the 60s, when I was a kid. There was the cold war, the fear of nuclear holocaust, overpopulation, famine, cancer and the extinction of rare species due to the depletion of the environment. My principal anxieties were that I would inherit a world poisoned by chemicals and overpopulation, threatened by nuclear fallouts and mutant genes. Since then, things have gotten worse at an alarming rate. But given that only about 5% of the population is intelligent, what lessons, ethics and ideals can one expect the majority of people will impart to their children to help make the world a better place? Let’s not forget that many parents will become inappropriate role models by directly contributing to the problem of overpopulation, the creation of waste, gas emissions and ultimately, the Earth’s destruction. By the age of six these considerations were already buzzing through my head. Maybe I’m part of the 5% but I don’t think it takes a genius to figure it out.

What is the meaning of life? The meaning of life is to have a meaningful life — whatever that means to you. Everyone’s got to figure it out for himself without the advertising. Forget consumerism and buying that new car you can’t afford. Think instead about making some conscious decisions such as growing a political and social conscience, about environmental awareness. Consider how your lifestyle impacts directly on to the Earth. Such considerations inevitably, lead to the reflection on whether or not to bring any more kids into the world. For me, since a very early age, it was clear that in a world that is overcrowded, where we deplete our natural resources at the expense of fresh water and clean air and where we abuse farm animals, we are living a precarious situation. Our survival is uncertain. It’s time to put a stop to this manic, greed-driven rat race. We need to take responsibility for the kind of world we want to leave behind for the next generations.

In the end, one comes to a rational conclusion with regard to procreation. The fact is that there are far too many, suffering, abandoned children in the world. Millions of them live in poverty, even in Europe. In every corner of the Earth there are starving, sick and orphaned children who don’t have access to education and basic health care. Many won’t survive; countless others are traded into slavery. Are they not all our children? Part of our global community? These children have a right to be nurtured and protected. As part of the human tribe, they are our responsibility too. Before we continue to blindly and narcissistically reproduce biological copies of our selves, we ought to reach beyond the advertising-slogan myth of the family. Help a child in need. If the value of family still resides in creating the foundation of society, then to care for the orphaned and the dislocated is to nurture our world, providing a better place for us all.

What about instinct, what about natural parenthood, I hear you scream. You believe that no love equals that, which a parent nurtures for the fruit of his loins. Really? In that case, I pity 50% of all natural parents namely, fathers. Because having forgone pregnancy and childbirth, they must be incapable of loving and nurturing their offspring to the same degree as natural mothers. This theory also implies that any adoptive child is short-changed on love. I don’t know about that. My grandfather was adopted. An adoptive child knows that his parents have made a conscious and voluntary decision to embrace him or her into their lives. Also, adoptive parents are aware that they are not the “owners” but the caretakers of the child.

Don’t get me wrong, choosing not to procreate dos not imply that I don’t like children or that I am against parenting. It’s just that to me, parenting is a concept that goes beyond genetics and family resemblance. The role of parent means that you are an adult responsible for someone who is not an adult yet. The responsibility to raise and educate a minor lies in your hands. Until they become independent, you are the career and the guide, the teacher and guardian of the child. This means accepting the child’s individuality and his or her own free will. You cannot mold or shape the child’s personality to suit your expectations. You must undertake this enormous, selfless task armed with faith and goodwil. Yet so much damage is done by grown-ups who use the family arena to re-enact their own frustrations and paranoias, and too many parents confuse their kids with property. And how many kids are born and raised knowing they were unwanted? My brother was one — sadly, these are common tragedies.

How can you hope to be a responsible parent if you can’t even manage family planning? It seems to me that from the outset, responsible parenting implies family planning rather than just keeping your fingers crossed, hoping it’s all going to turn out okay. This is why I chose not to become a mother. For me, it was a given that successful parenting requires a set of fundamental resources such as financial stability, a partner to share the workload, enough time and space to make room for baby. An optimistic outlook on life helps as well. This is why I decided that 16 was not the right time to embark on such a journey. A decade later I might have been wiser and financially independent, however, I have never believed in single parenthood (as an option). I believe that before you chose to bring a child into the world, you and your partner must be willing and able to provide all the love and infrastructure a child requires. Just take a look at the list of prerequisites to qualify for adoption. The list is long and detailed. What’s ironic is that if most natural parents applied this set of requirements to themselves, they’d fail the test. Being a smoker, for instance, immediately disqualifies you from adoption. So does a low income, or lack of education, a criminal record, or a chronic medical condition. Tragically, any misfit can go ahead and reproduce, leaving the rest of society to pick up the pieces.

I’ve traveled the world, interrupted a career to pursue my interests at university, written a novel, lived in Africa and generally, grown and experimented with life in all its endless possibilities. Today I’m a happy, fulfilled individual. Sadly, I wouldn’t be able to say the same thing if I’d been a single mom. Some other woman might have been happy and fulfilled with that role, but not I. Choosing to remain childfree, single and independent has granted me the freedom of risk-taking in defining my own life. And today, I can claim that it is a prosperous and challenging one. I’ve learned a great deal and I have a lot to offer. I abound with experience. This doesn’t make me better than other people, but it makes me better equipped to love, share and nurture, compared to 10-15 years ago. And, as an added bonus, my pursuits have allowed me to grow professionally and economically — something that motherhood would have prevented me from achieving. Now as I approach 40, I find myself unexpectedly and without having planned it, stable, financial and married. In other words, in an ideal position to contemplate the possibility of parenthood.

I still have dreams, goals and projects that I’m working on. One of them is to move to my husband’s homeland, Australia, and buy a house by the Ocean. I want to grow a garden and spend my mornings walking the dog along the beach; start my own business and focus on my writing. I will have revolutionized my life once again, and if the longing for a child should ever awaken, I would definitely embrace adoption. However, this isn’t something that I feel I must do out of fear of regret in later life. For me, like getting married, parenthood isn’t something I ‘m anxious about. When I met my husband for instance, I’d been independent all my life, then suddenly three years ago, he came along and I realized that he was my one and only. No one before him was right for me nor would anyone come after him. That is why we married him. With regards to bringing a child into our lives, I know that if and when the time is right, we’ll do it. Adoption has always appealed to me, ever since I was a child. Perhaps it’s because it’s impossible for me to put blinkers on and pretend that the bad stuff I see on the news every day, isn’t part of my world.

Throughout my life, I’ve been motivated by a strong sense of community, rather than by family ties. As for waiting for the right person, or the right time for a child, these things have a way of developing beyond one’s control. The future may be uncertain but I remain hopeful, and if we are true to ourselves and let things happen, as they will, I’m certain that we’ll always make the right choices.