When I was in my mid-30s, my then husband and I did try, and fail, to conceive a child. I’d seen other women who wanted babies so much that they almost seemed to be erasing a part of themselves with their anxiety. Though I would have welcomed a child, their yearning seemed foreign to me. My husband and I considered our options. The invasiveness of IVF troubled us, and we didn’t have that kind of money anyway. So we just decided to stop focusing on having a baby, and a baby never came.
In social situations around that time, when outsiders would nose into what I believe is private business, the fact that I had taken the path of least resistance gave me an easy out. If anyone asked why I didn’t have children, I could simply say that my husband and I had tried and failed. Not only was it the truth, but it sounded less cold than “I didn’t want any.”
And yet even today I rarely volunteer how utterly happy I am with the decision I made more than 20 years ago. Because I never had a child, I don’t really know how to miss the experience of having one. But I do recognize all the things that have come my way as the result of not having kids–and, by extension, being a woman on my own after my marriage broke up: not having children certainly made it less difficult to end the marriage when it became clear that my husband and I had to do so. In some ways, the baby I never had is a part of me. She has given me freedom.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member