Years ago, I worked at a small, independent cable television network called the Outdoor Channel. For most of my tenure, I was the only woman on the executive team. One day, the president of digital and I were talking. It was the sort of innocuous ‘getting to know you’ back-and-forth that’s common in the workplace. I talked about being married to my college sweetheart for 16 years. Todd talked about his wife and kids.
Then, he asked me if I had kids. I said I didn’t. Instead of just leaving it there, Todd started probing. He found it stunning that I’d been married for that long and had no progeny – as if procreating is the only reason to share a life with someone else. He was a cross between gobsmacked and indignant.
I explained I’d just never felt the urge to have children. Todd refused to drop it. He blurted out, “Are you barren?” I was astonished by his brazenness…and the use of language from the 1700s to describe women who can’t have children.
Asking a woman if she’s barren is the equivalent to asking a dude if he’s shooting blanks. It’s not an appropriate topic of conversation at work or anywhere. It’s intensely personal and may trigger a strong reaction.
Let’s say I was unable to have kids (I wasn’t). Maybe I’d tried several rounds of IVF and nothing worked. Maybe I’d had miscarriages. Perhaps my now ex-husband was infertile.
One never knows another’s fertility journey. Empathy should be your compass here. When in doubt, say less. If someone wants you to know, they’ll tell you. Otherwise, mind your own fucking business.
I’m now a decade older, and I’ve come to realize the vapid, narcissistic Todds of the world are commonplace. They believe their myopic, self-centered view of the world is the view. Anything incompatible with that view spurs rudeness, stridency and shameless assertion of their toxic masculinity.
Look at vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance who complained the US was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too."
Vance and his bros love to extole the virtues of women having children and going the trad wife route.
What he and his ilk fail to mention is that most women can’t afford to have kids. Very few families have the privilege to be one-income families. Women often have to work and a lot of us want to work. Consider that we dominate enrollment in undergraduate institutions and most professional schools. Most of us want to do something with our educations. And I don’t mean wiping asses and running the school carpool exclusively.
I always found the idea of having kids to be wholly unappealing. Everyone told me I’d change my mind about having kids. I didn’t. Given how I grew up, it’s not surprising I didn’t have kids.
When my mom got pregnant with me, she didn’t know my dad very well. They didn’t have a lot in common aside from being rebellious and desperately wanting to be loved. They had four kids within eight years. My dad was a full-time student for most of that time which left breadwinning and adulting to my mom. A lot of that adulting spilled over on me.
I watched my mom whip herself into a frenzy most days, trying to please an abusive boss and an abusive husband. It was the 1970s, and she was perpetually caught between two worlds, fitting into neither. She did all the housework, all the cooking and earned all the money. We were perpetually broke because there were too many mouths to feed and not enough income.
There was no support for my mom. Like a lot of abusers, my father isolated her from her family. There were no nannies, play dates or Mommy and Me groups. There was work, work and more work – and not the kind that feeds one’s soul. No, the kind of work my mom put in was more befitting of leg irons.
My mother’s life looked like prison to me. I wanted something different. I wanted to pursue my career without four kids hanging off me. I wanted to travel the world and not feel guilty. I wanted to be free to be me, whatever that looked like.
And that’s the point for the Todds and J.D. Vances of the world: they want women imprisoned. Motherhood is like Alcatraz in this country. Women are often alone on an island with no support systems for themselves or their children, trapped on an endless treadmill of suck.
They do all the labor at home and spend far too many hours mothering men whose parents’ one sole accomplishment was raising an entitled, emotionally immature oaf. These women then get to spend the rest of their waking hours at jobs that often aren’t reasonable or fulfilling.
That’s by design. It’s meant to keep us all trapped, exhausted and unengaged, leaving the governance of this world to men.
I rejected that version of life for myself. I’m 52 and don’t have kids. I live on an idyllic farm in New England with my husband and four sweet golden retrievers. Contrary to my old colleague Todd’s belief, my existence is not bleak and lifeless. I travel the world, garden, cook and hike. I read and write voraciously. I take naps in the middle of the day. I’ve been a CEO and founded four businesses. I get to spend a lot of time doing what I want, and I love that about my life. It gives me time to pay attention to the world around me and think deeply about other people.
And that makes me a very dangerous woman.
I love this piece. Thanks for sharing your life with us. It's always helpful. And empathy is what makes the difference in this crazy world. Peace!