Thank you thank you thank you for this. I wish comments like yours had more real estate in the world. I always needed a woman as a role model to empathize with and help me understand the choice to go child-free. I feel like there are not enough of us out there vocalizing this and making others feel confident in this choice. I feel so forgotten and left behind with societys intense focus on ensuring women are mothers.

I love so many comments in that discussion, including to forgo “what ifs” (love Cheryl Strayed’s the ghost ship that did not carry me).
For some people it might be clear, but I know myself and other women who do wonder the choice isn’t so much of a choice. There’s infertility, emotional and financial circumstances, lack of support network, the end of some career paths, state of the world, not having found the right partner at the right time… and could we talk about men, and gender-roles, and the expectations for mothers, too? “He’s really supportive and changes the diapers” just doesn’t cut it – from what I see with my friends it’s nearly always (one case, one single couple who really put an effort to have an equal partnership) the mother is the default and primary care-taker and can juggle parenting, caring for other (aging parents etc), work and tons of unrealistic expectations.

Ditto to what Sheila said! I’m 3 months post partum and still wearing my $23 maternity leggings most days.

@Clara to answer your question as to why some people have chosen the route of having children:

I love the framing of why choose to have them as much as why choose not to have them. I have one toddler daughter, trying to decide if we want to have a second. The reason I had my daughter is because I felt in my bones that I had a child that I needed to meet. I loved her before I knew her, and when she was born I knew her and loved her immediately. Ultimately what it boiled down to was that I wanted to, but I wanted to in the way I want to wake up and see the sun in the morning. I feel lucky every day that it was so clear for me, and that I was in a situation where I could then have a baby when I was ready with my partner. Which is also why I totally understand when my child free friends say they just want to be child free or they just don’t want to have kids.

Now that I have one kid though, which has been everything I could have hoped for and more, I feel completely ambivalent about having a second kid. Everyone around me and my husband is horrified when we mention we don’t necessarily know if we’re going to have a second baby, so we may be experiencing a very small version of what people who are child free go through. It’s extremely confusing and muddying to have everyone share their opinions so freely, and literally try to convince us to have a second human being because they, what, think only kids are weird? It’s so strange, but it’s also effective: after my husband and I are with family, we always mysteriously are leaning more toward having a second than not. It will be a really hard decision to make. The life in front of us with our one beautiful baby is clearly magical, and life seeing her as a sibling and getting to see a whole second life and personality come into being would be magical too.

I’m trying to focus on the fact that they would BOTH be magical. Just like child free life is magical. I have been SO GRATEFUL for my child free best friend in these first 18 months of parenting. She has come to visit, loves my baby, finds her the best clothes at the thrift store, and is so invested while also living her best life. In the last year she’s been to burning man, London, Sedona, on a silent retreat, a million dates, etc – I’m living vicariously while I spend all of my money on daycare. The good news is, every life can be magical, you just have to see the magic in the life you choose or the life that is given to you.

@Reba, thank you!