| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  |
| Elizabeth I was a career woman before anyone knew what that was. She opted to express her urges to shape, rear, mentor, support, and create through her work as a monarch. Image via WikiMedia Commons, public domain in the US. |
The one thing I see in so many of these conversations with self or nonselves is a certain perception of inevitability about one choice or the other. Of course, if a woman doesn't want to have children, there's no either/or false dichotomy here. But for women who feel torn about the decision, the message they receive is very much a binary choice: have kids=career stalled and sacrifices made; don't have kids=career chugs onward.
We tend to dichotomize the situation and assume certain outcomes that in either case are not guaranteed. If a woman chooses not to have children because she determines that other considerations carry more weight for her and she's self aware enough to know it...does that guarantee that she's going to have a career? No. Even childless people encounter unforeseen obstacles ranging from sudden absence of funds to shuttering of an agency to obsolescence of the job's focus to personal events that include heath, disability, the health of others, marriage, divorce, death, and taxes.
Choosing not to have or adopt a child is no guarantee that in turn, you will have a career. Does it help you control your life a little more? Absolutely. Does not having children mean more personal flexibility should those obstacles arise? Certainly. But not having them doesn't somehow smooth the way to a career of success and accolades, either.
If you elect to have children, I probably don't need to say that the guarantees here are extremely limited. They'll be H. sapiens, that's assured. Beyond that... if you really want to make the Fates laugh, just try to make plans if you're a parent. Does that mean a child or children will derail your own dreams? They may. They may not. Just as choosing the path of career offers no assurances of success, choosing the path of parenthood won't ensure a career failure or dreams denied, either.
In some senses, this choice can seem binary, but it's less an either/or than it is, at some point in time, irreversible. If you're female and you choose to have children, you can't send them back once you've had them. If you're female and you choose not to have children, after a certain point in time, you can't change your mind and decide you want to do that after all. Either way, you reach a point of commitment that ultimately allows for no changes of heart.
And that's the part that's scary. What if you regret it later? I don't actually know any women who regret having children, but it may be that women who do don't speak out about it. After all... imagine the outcry or just imagine how the children would feel. Best to keep that on the down-low. And I know women who've elected not to have children, and they're very happy with their fulfilling, active lives. Do they have regrets? If so, it may be something they prefer not to discuss openly. And I'd argue that an overall feeling of life satisfaction, whether you're childed or childless, is the best antidote to regret.
And then there's that whole issue of time, the factor that drives this discussion. After all, if we had all the time in the world, women who find the question a conundrum of some urgency could relax a little. Time, as we perceive it from the human perspective, always seems to demand rapidity of action even as our ability to live only in the moment stymies us. We make these decisions solely with the information we have in-hand, with the feelings and instincts and expectations for ourselves and our lives as we understand them in the now. We have no surety about how the context 5 or 10 or 15 years hence will influence our attitudes, our regrets, or our perspective in hindsight.
But life itself has a way of unfolding on its own timetable. You may worry that having a child has forced or will force you to to table a dream permanently. Yet I know two people--my parents--who achieved in their 50s and 60s goals that seemed elusive for years, including tenure and publishing a book. I can only imagine how impossible either of those seemed to them 20 or 30 years ago when they were up to their ears in children and work and all of the accompanying detritus of family life and set aside for decades their dreams of scholarship and writing. In the end, time opened up for them, and they went right back to that table and gathered those dreams to themselves. They weren't dreams denied, just dreams considerably delayed.
You may worry that choosing not to have a child will leave you looking back with yearning in a decade or so. I can point to both men and women who've chosen not to have children. They're happy and fulfilled and doing wonderful things in the world. The urge to shape, rear, teach, support, mentor, and create outside of yourself isn't one that we can express only through parenthood. Both women and men have many outlets for that expression, for experiencing the feeling of well-doing that derives from channeling those urges in positive ways.
In the end, that's probably a common goal for most of us, that feeling of well-doing. But we have no way of knowing if we'll achieve it, whether we choose fulfillment in part through parenting, through career, or through both. Indeed, any of our best-laid plans that we carefully predicate on these choices can gang agley --and oft, they do-- in any of Fate's unforeseen turnings. As long as you move along your path, working at fulfillment and doing wonderful things for the world in your way, while you still can, that's really the best anyone can do with the moments life places at our disposal. Especially when a subsequent moment can make it clear that life offers no guarantees.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.![]()
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.