It takes a village of respectful opinions

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This article was published 26/07/2024 (498 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Conservative men, pick a lane, I implore you.

Here I thought you believed mothers couldn’t run countries because they’re too distracted and might have to leave work early. Now you’re saying having had biological children is a prerequisite for being president of the United States?

Comments made in 2021 by J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, are making the rounds again in which he says America is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they have made” — including U.S. Vice-President and likely Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris — “who don’t really have a direct stake” in the country.

“Childless cat ladies” is, of course, extremely offensive. Some of us have dogs.

The discourse around child-free women isn’t always so … flagrant. But when you are a woman without kids — as I am — you encounter people’s discomfort with it all the time. I enjoy irony as much as the next gal, so I find it mildly entertaining when the kind of people who lecture child-free people for being selfish will do so by listing all the wonderful things that they, themselves, personally get out of having children.

It’s less entertaining when it’s implied that women without kids can’t possibly know real love and fulfillment. Or when we’re regarded as objects of derision and pity, accused of doth protesting too much when we try to defend our choices — our lives — to people who have made up their minds that we’re miserable.

Imagine having such impossibly narrow definitions of love and fulfilment, as well as what women’s lives can look like. Imagine being unable — or unwilling — to consider that people are capable of caring about kids who don’t share their DNA. Imagine being so casually and needlessly cruel to women who are navigating pregnancy loss and infertility.

From where I’m sitting, that’s far more pitiful and selfish and miserable than a woman living the life she wants to live.

My child-free status is, in no way, a tragedy — least of all to me, the person who actually has to live my life. I get to do what I want when I want while enjoying a relatively rested appearance that I like to joke is thanks to a bougie French skincare routine called Sans Enfant.

I believe there are many paths to a full, meaningful life and there will always be thousands of routes we’ll never take. Not all of us are mothers just as not all of us are ballerinas or welders or brain surgeons. It’s fine. There will always be the sister ghost ships that didn’t carry us, to paraphrase author Cheryl Strayed, that we can only salute from the shore.

But if a woman doesn’t have kids, people expect her not only to have reasons, but to be willing to provide those reasons. Sometimes those reasons are tragic. Sometimes the reason is “I don’t have kids because I don’t want any.”

For a time, I thought I wanted kids, but actually what I thought is that I should want kids because other people wanted me to have kids. And that’s possibly the worst reason to have kids.

There’s a weird assumption that women without children must hate them. I like kids. Always have. I have a much younger brother than me. I babysat regularly for six different families starting at age 12 — it still boggles my mind that people entrusted me, then also a child, with infants that could barely control their own heads.

Older kids liked me because I actually played their little made-up games with them, even though I don’t particularly enjoy making plastic animals talk. I was a full-on nanny to a little girl for the summer after Grade 12.

I’ve engaged with and taken care of kids in some way, shape or form for most of my life is what I’m saying.

Harris may not have biological children, but she is a stepmother. I am not a mom, but I am an aunt.

I am Auntie (and Teta) Jen to one official niece as well as to many of my friends’ kids, and I have the Best Aunt Ever mugs and school pictures and pencil-crayon drawings and friendship bracelets to prove it.

I relish whatever role I can play in their lives, though obviously, it will be that of Cool Aunt. I have perspectives and wisdom and love to offer. I can help shape the person they will become.

Because goodness knows that kids need safe adults in their lives. They need other grown-ups they can trust, who will show up for them, step up for them, support them and care about them. They need people they can look up to. These can be aunties, but they can also be uncles, grandparents, their friends’ parents, teachers, the list goes on.

Children need more nurturing in their lives, not less.

Being an aunt is a position I take seriously, not just because I genuinely like spending time with these hilarious, brilliant little weirdos, but because I care about supporting my friends and family members who have chosen motherhood.

“Just wait until you have kids…” “You think you’re tired?” Those statements used to make me chafe; now I recognize them as mothers just wanting to be seen and have their struggles validated. Mothers who are at once placed on a pedestal and rendered invisible by a culture that claims to care deeply about motherhood and then goes out of its way to make it as difficult as impossible.

It takes a village. Beware of politicians trying to burn that village to the ground.

I want a good future for our children. And I want little girls, especially, to know that they can be mothers or not. That they can take care of children or not. That their lives will be beautiful and valid and important simply because they are theirs, and they don’t need to justify their choices to anyone.

They are the authors of their own stories. Their futures belong to them.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com