Gouri's Story

The Issue Issue

Since I've got used to issuing disclaimers, let me issue one right away: Let me hasten to first spell out that I admire people with clear, strong and good mothering instincts. They're the ones who should become parents.  No doubt about it.

People like me, who're totally full of doubts about the whole parenting package, we're wonderful 'significant others' in children's lives. We make up that important contingent of adults: aunts and uncles and godparents. The ones who'll generally hang loose with kids without having the weighty duties of 'being a parent.' We're the ones to whom children go for holidays; the ones who're happy to babysit; who'll smooth ruffled adolescent feathers; who'll laugh at the same joke again and again; whose freezer always has ice-cream; in front of whom teenagers can say 'damn' and 'shit' and maybe even 'bloody' and sometimes even 'the f-word' and the sky will NOT fall down and nobody will go to hell. The kids' parents need us too. We're the safety-valve when the parenting pressure builds up. But at the end of the day, we're childless, and by choice, thank you.

If you live in India, you get used to total strangers on trains asking you, even before they know your name: "Any issue?" Which is an archaic expression for: "Got any kids?" And when you answer "No," they almost always cluck in sympathy. If you're a woman, and another woman asks you the question, then she will go on to ask: "Married how many years? Been to a doctor?" As a person who has chosen not to have children, you then have two options: Either you chicken out and
mumble: "Yes, I've been to a doctor, but I can't have kids." So that the sympathetic clucking goes on for a while, and then she leaves you alone. Or, you take the tougher option -- if you're up to being lectured, harangued, questioned and finally labelled -- and say pleasantly: "I've decided not to have children."

It's a little easy to handle the reaction if you're on a train; it ends with the journey. But there's the Inquisition that you must go through many, many times over from neighbours, colleagues, older and younger family members throughout your 'reproductive life.' And I believe it doesn't end when you declare that you're now menopausal. The "You should; you ought to, you must" merely changes to a grimmer "You should have, you ought to have."

Let me list here the various theories about me and people like me that I have heard first-hand:

"Doesn't want responsibilities/is selfish."

You must have all heard that one, and never mind if you're looking after old parents, being very good friends with a cranky mother-in-law, being a more-than-responsible aunt, always being there for a friend in hospital (because people with kids have to take their kids swimming/playing/studying/camping, etc.), and generally pulling your own weight in the world. It's simply not enough!

"Likes dogs more than kids."

Well, you got me there. Have to admit that it's true most times. But what's the problem with that? As long as I nurture and love and cherish and enjoy some creature, I think God (or whoever) is quite happy with me. Which is more than I can say for the parents of a lot of children. Any shrink will confirm that!

"Puts her career first."

I'm sorry, but all of LIFE is too important for me to mess up with relationships that I am not willing to take on. And again, in my defence I will say this: I've given up a high-pressure job and moved to a smaller city for my dogs to have a good place to be in, and for my nieces and nephews to see more of me, and to be near my parents. So the career thing is just
hooey!

"Has missed out on real love."

I don't know about 'real,' but yes, I may have missed out on a certain kind of loving. And yet I see so much closed-circuit, nuclear-family love all around me, and I can see that while they're bathed in parent-child love, they've cut themselves off from so many other kinds of love. Ever noticed how a very loving parent will be downright mean to the other kids around when he feels that his/her child is being short-changed in any way?

"Is defying a law of nature."

This one I've heard from several gynecologists -- women that too -- who have become so hostile once they've heard that I've chosen not to have kids. One of them even said coldly: "Then why don't you have your uterus removed?" I was just 33 -- and perfectly healthy, so I looked shocked. To which she said: "By your own admission," (note the word) "your uterus is a vestigial organ -- why don't we just get rid of it?"

The latest and most bizarre theory:

"I bet you're a loner and you don't like music and you don't have a sense of humour."

That one's come fresh off the Net -- the other day, when I was in a Chat Room. After the initial introductions, and after I said that I was childless by choice, a 26-year-old man shot this one at me! I protested, I told him he was being foolishly judgmental, and that his pre-conceived notions were shocking. I found I was explaining myself, demonstrating that I learnt
music, that I had lots of friends, that I could be very funny. Trying to convince a total stranger that I wasn't some kind of freak!

You know what? I have a strong suspicion that, under all these theories and allegations and hostility, there are a whole lot of trapped people who fear that you've exercised a choice and are happy, while nobody told them that they had a choice in the first place.