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Childless by Choice
206 Plays1 year ago
Plenty of women aren’t becoming mothers, at least not in the traditional sense, and landing there is more often than not a complicated journey. Today Julie gets the conversation started by sharing her own story- plenty more episodes on this topic to follow!
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to outside of session. I'm your host, licensed clinical social worker and therapist BFF, Julie Hilton. We're going to cover all the things here, whether it's mental health, entrepreneurship, relationships, trauma, or just life. Nothing is off limits. Hopefully you'll laugh a little and learn a lot, but most importantly, feel encouraged on your journey to live empowered.
Podcast Reception and Episode Planning
00:00:32
Speaker
Hey everyone and welcome back to another episode of Outside of Session. Before we jump into today's topic, I wanna pause and just say thank you so much for all the love and support that the podcast has gotten so far. Today is actually the first episode that I'm recording since I have released, started releasing the podcast. So like I went ahead and recorded all of the episodes that you've heard so far. I recorded them.
00:01:01
Speaker
all before I released episode one because I wanted to kind of like have several weeks out already recorded so that I could drop one a week and not feel kind of like pressure to have them recorded all at once.
00:01:16
Speaker
Um, and so this is the first time I'm recording an episode since releasing episode one.
Audience Engagement and Feedback
00:01:24
Speaker
And I just have to say thank you so much for all the positive feedback and all the love that I've been getting on the podcast. Like you have no idea how much that means to me and how encouraging it is. So I just wanted to say thank you so much. And I've been getting a lot of love, especially on Instagram through all of my followers there. It's at empower underscore counseling.
00:01:44
Speaker
So if you want to follow me there, that's a really good place for you to ask questions that give me suggestions on what you want to hear on the show. Obviously, you can leave them in the show notes, you can ask questions there. But Instagram is a really good way to connect with me so that I can get your thoughts, get your feedback and make sure that this entire podcast is really like including things that you want to be hearing about, learning about and processing through together. So make sure you follow me there so that we can connect.
Choosing to be 'Childless by Choice'
00:02:14
Speaker
So today's episode is, this is a conversation that I'm really interested in diving into, mostly because it's kind of a topic that I feel is, it's a relatively new thing that I think we're allowing ourselves to talk about and allowing ourselves to process through more openly. And it's this, it's the big life question of to have kids or to not have kids.
00:02:43
Speaker
And the thing is there are so many different angles to this conversation, so many different emotions, so many different variables and life experiences that can lead us all to the same like destination or decision.
00:03:00
Speaker
if you want to call it that. And it's one of those topics for me that I honestly get a little bit overwhelmed even trying to figure out where to start with it. Because there really is just like so much to unpack. And of course, there's a lot of my like own personal emotions tied up in it too. And I'll share more about that in a minute.
00:03:19
Speaker
But for today, I thought that I just wanted to get the conversation going. And even though I don't have like a, this is five things you need to know on a slideshow ready to go for you, I still want to just get the conversation going.
Terminology: 'Childless' vs 'Child-free'
00:03:33
Speaker
So let's just like, let's just jump in. So first of all, childless by choice is a term that I've heard used lately. And I don't want
00:03:45
Speaker
I don't know how I feel about that term, honestly, like I haven't completely figured out how I feel about it. Because childless doesn't exactly seem to fit for me at least. And I think this topic is so much broader and so much more complex than just the simple childless piece of it. Because it doesn't mean that there are no kids in your life.
00:04:07
Speaker
just not in the most traditional way. So I'm not even sure who all like qualifies for this title, other than those who just aren't raising kids full time.
Reasons for Not Having Children
00:04:18
Speaker
Like maybe that's the definition for me is people who aren't full time caregivers of kids is what more what I'm talking about.
00:04:28
Speaker
Like maybe something like non-biomom could fit in there. Or my new favorite way to say it is that I didn't use my uterus. But the term childless just feels a bit ick to me. But because it implies a lack of something like childless. And I think that that's one of my personal main issues is that society tells us that our lives are lacking.
00:04:54
Speaker
And yes, again, I'm saying hour because, again, I think I fall into this broad category in some ways, but I'll share more about that in a minute.
00:05:08
Speaker
So first you have like the childless part that I'm not fully on board with, which I have, I have seen other people refer to it as child free by choice. And maybe that's a little bit better, like a little bit more fitting, it doesn't, it doesn't feel quite like you're saying that you're lacking something. But for me, even in both of those phrases, the by choice part is so much more complicated than it sounds. Because oftentimes the choice
00:05:38
Speaker
wasn't to not have kids. For a lot of people, maybe that choice was to save our own life. It could be because we chose not to pass down generational trauma that we knew hadn't ended with us. Maybe the choice was to not bring a child into an abusive relationship. And these choices happen a lot, y'all. There are a lot of people
00:06:07
Speaker
who would have chosen to have a child, but they made the difficult decision not to literally for safety reasons. And I don't think that we take the time to like acknowledge how frequently these kind of decisions are having to be made. So again, the choice wasn't necessarily to not be a mom or to be childless or child free, however you want to say it. But the choice was rather not being a mother
00:06:38
Speaker
like not being a mother became a side effect of a choice that was made that needed to be made.
Challenges of Infertility and Alternatives
00:06:46
Speaker
Um, maybe the choice was simply not to have a child with a man or a partner who didn't want to have a child. And that was enough reason for you not to pursue being a bio mom past that decision, you know? So for reference, I'm also not sure where it fits into this conversation. Um, people who,
00:07:07
Speaker
wanted to conceive tried to couldn't and then chose not to adopt or do IVF, etc. So their choice was to not pursue something more aggressive, I guess, for their own personal reasons that we really shouldn't judge. And I have no clue if people in that category would be would want to be included under this umbrella.
00:07:34
Speaker
And I can't imagine how painful that must be if they didn't want to be here. So I won't say yes or no. I would leave that up to them if it helps them to be in this category so that they feel like they have a community of other women and other people who don't have children.
00:07:54
Speaker
But I mentioned that because I imagine they feel pretty either unseen or misunderstood at times if they, again, made the decision just not to go any further. And I imagine that being a really painful place. And here's the thing, each of those choices that I just listed, each of them likely were very painful and came with
00:08:22
Speaker
great amounts of sacrifice and probably even greater amounts of grief.
Deciding Against Parenthood and Social Judgment
00:08:29
Speaker
So when we make assumptions that it was an easy decision or that the decision itself was not to have children, we really pass over people's pain.
00:08:44
Speaker
Like all of these scenarios involved a certain level of pain or dysfunction in relationships or sacrifice.
00:08:55
Speaker
The pain from the potential desire to have a kid that didn't happen because of that choice, I just want to point that out that that it doesn't mean that it was an easy decision to arrive at. Now, on the other hand, you do, of course, have like there are absolutely plenty of women who have just decided that they have no interest in being a mother. And the choice was possibly relatively easy for them to arrive at.
00:09:24
Speaker
But again, that still doesn't mean that it doesn't come with some complicated feelings that they had to sort through, especially dealing with how other people handled with that decision. So whether you easily decided not to have kids or if it was a result of a more difficult decision, we end up under kind of the same umbrella of like this child free umbrella. It
Historical and Societal Expectations of Motherhood
00:09:48
Speaker
just was very different paths that led us here.
00:09:51
Speaker
And to be often, to be honest, often I think that the position of people who just decide that they don't want to have children, of straight up deciding not to have kids, I feel like a lot of time that gets the most like, hate and judgment and criticism from society. Because it's like it's
00:10:11
Speaker
It seemed or it was considered and I'm saying that past tense like considered, it was considered so unnatural for a woman not to want to have children like gasp, you know, and that's because for so long, it was a necessary.
00:10:30
Speaker
It was for women's survival in the past, like stability in life was dependent on marriage and bearing children. So it wasn't even a question of desire or preference. It was a part of women's survival.
00:10:46
Speaker
Um, we can't say that it's like all of a sudden just now happening that women now are not wanting to have kids. Like all of a sudden something has changed. It's just that now women have the opportunity to even think about and consider not having kids without worrying about it, making them fall into like a life of poverty or an inability to get their needs met. Um, yeah, but alas, plenty of old views.
00:11:15
Speaker
still shame women for this choice and that is a painful consequence that has to be dealt with and sorted through by women that have arrived at this decision of it's just not for them.
Julie's Personal Story and Role as a Bonus Mom
00:11:28
Speaker
So like I said in the beginning literally there is so much to unpack here but for the sake of today's episode I just want to share a little bit about my own story and why this is a very personal subject for me.
00:11:42
Speaker
For me, I never, I never really thought about wanting kids like it wasn't something I was ever encouraged to think about. It was just kind of an assumption. But I never, I honestly never felt a pressure from my family especially. But there was this feeling that I always had of not if but when I became a mother.
00:12:03
Speaker
But I was certainly not one of those people that ever like fantasized about what kind of mom I was going to be and I didn't have names picked out. And I never felt, it's still to this day, I've never felt like this deep calling or desire to have kids. Like I know many of my friends have like described to me, um, of how deeply they want to, wanted to be a mother.
00:12:25
Speaker
And then at the same time, life did not go for me the way that fairy tales go and the way that you, society tells you it's going to go. I wasn't engaged in college and immediately married and ready to start a family by the time I was 25 years old. I was 29 and about to move into my 30s and I was 100% single, not even dating.
00:12:51
Speaker
like didn't have anybody on my radar. And so I was just like not really thinking about my baby clock ticking. I also like didn't feel like I was old enough to be a mom yet. Like I never got to that place of feeling like yes, I am mature enough to be a mother. So at that point in my life at 29 years old, it wasn't even on my radar to think about having kids. And because for me with like the values that my family had taught me, you were supposed to do things in a certain order order, you should
00:13:21
Speaker
get married, get a husband first. And again, since I wasn't even dating, I wasn't contemplating the kids part. I was just like way too single for that.
00:13:31
Speaker
And then a few months later, I randomly eloped with my best friend and I could do a whole other episode on relationships and how that happened. Um, but we randomly got married right when I turned 30 years old and he is nine years older than me and has two kids from a previous marriage who I absolutely from the very beginning just completely just adored.
00:13:56
Speaker
And when we got together, they were, let's see, they were 6 and 10 years old when we met, and I looked. So, they weren't babies, but they were still really little. Like, I think back now, and Wednesday was 6 years old, like, she was such a baby and she was so little, I just didn't realize it at the time. Like, I look back on it now and I realize how little 6 years old really is.
00:14:22
Speaker
um like so lucky to have met them when I did and really and truly like I have absolute best case scenario with being a bonus mom but I spent the first couple of years that we were married just really trying to solidify that bond with them and invest in our relationship so like getting pregnant still was not on my mind at that point but then at some point when I realized that it was time to think about it
00:14:51
Speaker
Um, it wasn't like a fun thought for me. I was, I was quite panicky and feeling like this weird pressure. And the question I had to ask myself, it was, would being a bonus mom at that point be like, quote unquote, enough for me? Like, I don't know, does this like, check the mom box?
00:15:15
Speaker
And it was also really hard for me to define like, am I a mom or am I not, especially for me because my kids and yes, I fully refer to them as my kids now. But they have a fantastic bio mom. And she's their full time parent. And they are literally lacking for nothing in terms of a mom like she is phenomenal. And I thank God for that all the time.
00:15:40
Speaker
like the great relationship and the great co parenting relationship that we have. But because she's so good, I literally am I'm a bonus in their life. I'm not having to fill in any gaps in their life because she she is so great. So while some bonus moms end up being more in the role of a full time caregiver, so maybe they feel a little bit differently about their role than I do. That's just not our situation. Like I definitely feel like a bonus.
00:16:09
Speaker
Um, but ultimately at this point, I'm 35 years old and there are no plans for me to get pregnant. And at this point, even if I wanted to, that would be a long, hard, expensive, and painful road probably for me and for my husband. Um, and even if we still went down that road there, there wouldn't be a guarantee of pregnancy.
00:16:36
Speaker
So I'm not even sure to what extent this is by choice
Pregnancy Decisions and Societal Pressures
00:16:40
Speaker
at this point versus a lack of me making a decision earlier and now I don't know like nature has just decided for me or something. But I don't know that I ever landed on a definite clear decision for myself of
00:16:58
Speaker
I'm actively choosing that in this life I will not carry a child or raise a child or children from, you know, scratch. But yet here I am, like I'm, I'm under this umbrella and my story is just so much different from anybody else's.
00:17:15
Speaker
And so I find myself questioning like, since I do have bonus kids or step kids, and we do have like this awesome relationship where I do feel like we have this incredible bond, where do I fit into this childless or child free category? Because again, when people ask me, like, Oh, do you have kids? I say yes, without a thought. And it's really nobody's business.
00:17:40
Speaker
that they're bonus kids that I'm not their bio mom. But I do know that I'm not a full time caregiver. And I didn't, I didn't birth no babies, you know. So I don't know, sometimes there's this feeling of like, what does that make me? And plenty of people would say that I don't have the right to call myself a mom, not just because of my like unused uterus. But because I've never cleaned up a diaper explosion in the backseat of my car.
00:18:10
Speaker
while running on absolutely no sleep. And honestly, point taken there, like I did not have to do a lot of those hard years. I just feel like childless is not inclusive enough of a term for all these different scenarios because I don't consider myself child free. And yet I also know that I
00:18:33
Speaker
I do not have the responsibility that so many like bio moms are full time caregivers have. So I guess like so many other things in life, there is a spectrum and nothing is very clear about it.
00:18:51
Speaker
And here's here's what I want to really encourage anyone who is particularly like judgmental of others decisions or just not understanding of the complexities here. I want to encourage you to understand that for the majority of people who have somehow landed here, it did not come lightly. It wasn't an afterthought or an easy decision. Tears were shed, painful conversations were had.
00:19:19
Speaker
And even for me today, I still think that I have made the best decisions for myself. And the thing is, you never have to be 100% happy with every part of a decision.
00:19:29
Speaker
to know that it was still the best one.
Finding Purpose Beyond Motherhood
00:19:33
Speaker
I think about what I struggled with the most is growing up in a super conservative Christian home, I was influenced to believe that it's part of my calling as a woman to get married and bear children, or that it's part of my purpose in life.
00:19:53
Speaker
So that took a really big toll on me for a long time. Now I have fully realized that that is such a manmade point of view and I've been able to release that nonsense, but it did. It took a long time and it took a lot of work to get here. And it doesn't mean that I'm not still met with judgment at times, especially because I think about the times that I was told that I would regret not having kids.
00:20:22
Speaker
And I had to get to a place of realizing that that is not the same thing as wanting children. Having kids because you're afraid that you will regret not having them is not the same thing as wanting them. That is coming from a place of fear and shame, and those are never really good motivators for making really big life decisions.
00:20:45
Speaker
I feel like I'm kind of all over the place with this topic today, but that's, again, only because there are so many different directions that I can go with it. And I plan to do so many more episodes about this in the future. My hope for today is only to approach the subject and then be able to dive a little bit deeper into different aspects in the future.
00:21:06
Speaker
For instance, I might be able to do like an entire episode on how to work through finding your purpose when it seems like everyone around you is finding theirs through their experience of motherhood because I know that that's something that especially as all of my friends have had kids over the years that I just I don't relate to on the same level with them.
00:21:27
Speaker
But for now, I'm just curious to hear from our listeners, especially those that fit somewhere in this category of child free by choice or didn't use your uterus, whatever you want to do to describe yourself.
Listener Invitation for Sharing Experiences
00:21:40
Speaker
I really want to hear like what struggles
00:21:43
Speaker
you have had, what you've gone through, what struggles you've had, how have people responded either positively or negatively to your choices, and what kind of things you're currently processing through that we can as a community and as a group like learn from each other and process together.
00:22:00
Speaker
So make sure you drop me a note in the comment section below or send me a DM through Instagram if you want to. That'll help your identity stay a little bit more confidential. It'll only stay between me and you. It won't be out there for public. But let me know what your interests are in this really complicated and complex topic that we are all just trying to figure out together. So make sure you like this episode, subscribe, share it with your friends so that this podcast can reach more people and we'll talk to you next time.
00:22:30
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Outside of Session. Remember, while I am a licensed therapist, this podcast is not a substitute for individual therapy. The contents of this episode are for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you are having a mental health emergency, please dial 911 for immediate assistance or dial 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.