This article explains how I feel pretty much perfectly, and I’m glad it was written. The question “Why don’t you want to have children?” has never felt right to me. I don’t have an easy answer. Sure, I’ve struggled to come up with reasons that might make others understand. I’ve even asked others to explain why they chose to have children, and none could give me an answer beyond “That’s what you do!” or “I just wanted them!”
Yet my response of “I just don’t want them” or “I just never have” isn’t adequate to others as an explanation of not wanting children. I’ve written about this before, and it’s not something that I hide. I don’t have children, because I don’t want to have children. It’s not something that I thought much about until I became old enough to have children and people heard that I didn’t want them. I thought I had to have some kind of “good” excuse for it, but there really isn’t one beyond the fact that I’ve never wanted them. I don’t have a burden of keeping up the human race (we’re not exactly hurting for humans these days), so why the need to justify something that I’ve basically felt my entire life?
Liška said it much more succinctly than I ever could, so I’ll leave her to it here:
I never needed reasons, and those of you who “chose” to be childfree don’t need them either. What thankfully isn’t artificial, and what will never be, is that I am who I am—a NotMom since I was nascent. Childfree by a choice I never actually made.
I was born this way.