Courtesy of Christina Wyman
I am a 44-year-old child-free woman and certified cat lady. My list of reasons for not having children is as varied and gruesome as the day is long. I grew up in a home defined by chaos, emotional invalidation, substance misuse, and financial insecurity.
I knew early on that I didn't want a child of my own to inherit the legacy I've spent my life healing and extricating from. Remaining child-free was the wisest and kindest choice I could have made.
When I was growing up, my parents told us about how their own parents struggled in the 50s, 60s, and 70s to put food on the table. Birth control had been on the market for only a few years before my youngest aunts and uncles were born, so there were 10 mouths to feed across both sides of the family.
Holiday and birthday celebrations were modest, especially on my father's side. When he sensed that my sister and I needed some perspective, Dad reminded us of the many Christmases when his single mother, a woman who barely had a middle school education, could not afford to give her children gifts. To help supplement income, he shined shoes on street corners in Queens, New York, as a young child.
My maternal grandfather, a US veteran, was especially fond of sharing stories about his financially strapped upbringing.
"We were very, very poor, Christina," he would say, as he described how his mother snatched pigeons perched at her kitchen windowsill, also in Queens. He would laugh as he talked about how these birds became dinner when there was nothing else for him and his siblings to eat. I was too busy dry-heaving to appreciate the humor.
What I could not have realized then but understand now was just how much our family's financial legacy shaped my desire — or lack thereof — to start a family of my own.
I was 12 when I began hoarding my allowance and sometimes even my lunch money. I felt like a millionaire when, as a child, I had five crisp dollar bills to my name. Even today, I am frugal with money and have tremendous difficulty treating myself. I've been wearing most of the same clothes for 20 years, and a fancy cupcake or freshly pressed juice often feels far too indulgent when I consider my family's history of doing without.
Courtesy of Christina Wyman
Despite common narratives that there are very few valid reasons to remain child-free, such as affordability and concerns about global warming, the fact is that any reason a person chooses not to have a child is a good one, as long as it's theirs.
Life as a child-free person is not just about hoarding money, going on fancy vacations, or sleeping in on weekends. I don't vacation much, and I wake up earlier than most people most days of the week because I'm wired like a rooster. Stereotypes of what it means to be a child-free woman are nothing more than a caricature — though, yes, I do have cats.
And though I don't want children myself, like many other child-free women, I'm an advocate for families. I am an educator and also a children's book author. My life's work, in its own way, has been dedicated to children, families, and their health and well-being.
Especially in my work as a writer for children, I get to contribute to society in a way that supports hoards of children I will never meet, by writing stories about issues they and their families care about. Because even though I'm a child-free woman, children are still important to me, and this is one key way that I've been able to contribute to their worlds.
I hope one day we can tell a different story about what it means to be childfree and pro-cat. Children are awesome. And so are cats. And so are the women who have devoted their lives to caring for both.
